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Blackboxvoting.org Raises Vote-Audit FOIA Request
aacool writes "Blackboxvoting.org has raised the largest Freedom of Information request in history. At 8:30 p.m. Election Night, Black Box Voting blanketed the U.S. with the first in a series of public records requests, to obtain internal computer logs and other documents from 3,000 individual counties and townships. Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit. Among the first requests sent to counties (with all kinds of voting systems -- optical scan, touch-screen, and punch card) is a formal records request for internal audit logs, polling place results slips, modem transmission logs, and computer trouble slips."
just when we thought the election was over... hopefully everything was computed properly...
Get your torrents...
I understand made use of electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold. Their CEO pledged to do whatever was in his power to swing the election towards George. Interesting... Plus the exit polls seemed to suggest a different winner.
So much for that....
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
It's done. Move on. Get over it.
Blackboxvoting.org is a non-profit supported by donations. Screw the FSF and the EFF. Give your money now to these guys and shine the light on the roaches.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I hear Diebold uses WWIV for it's BBS Software...
I wonder if I can play Foodfight when I logon to their vote tally BBS's?
Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there? Would we have to rehold the election? Or could the current winner be undone?
Out of curiosity, can anyone expect to process and audit that data in a reasonable timeframe? Especially on a volunteer basis?
I'm all for electronic voting, with the promise of easy to use polls that allow for more immediate and accurate tracking of results, but hopefully this will shine the light onto the glaring need for greater audit measures and failsafes to be built into the software used to power these applications.
I'm glad someone's on this. The scariest thing about all these new voting technologies is the idea that if something were to go wrong, intentionally or otherwise, we wouldn't even find out about it.
I was thinking if *I* could mount a legal challenge , even if Kerry doesn't. I am an affected party. Glad to see someone's on the case.
A most... daring move, I have to say. The very perspective and magnitude of task such as doing independant audit of complete US presidential elections is... staggeringly humongous. I am afraid that the blackboxvoting.org does not posess facilities, technology and manpower to handle the avalanche of raw data that might hit them as the result of this request - obviously, to do a proper audit, they'd need to start from individual ballots... all 110+ million of them, plus all the disqualified ballots, duplicate ballots, questionable ballots?
:). But I'm afraid it'll be a wasted effort.
In the aftermath, I am afraid that, if the audit indicates there are irregularities or foul play involved in the elections, reply might simply be 'It is counting error on your end, you don't have capacities for competently performing an audit of this size.' Besides, I just might think not enough of Americans will actually care.
Bottom line... I sure do hope the audit works out. I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged (being from a former communist eastern european state myself, I saw a number of those
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
The only people who would question the authenticity of the United States of America's election process via the "e-voting" method are those are support the ending of freedom and the resurgence of terror!
Why wouldn't you just trust the results you see in the media? Why must you map the tunnels that carry our infastructure only a terrorist would need that information!
Remember 10 out of 10 terrorists support John Kerry! If you are questioning the election results you must not support Bush and thus you must be a terrorist.
I'm only 52% kidding.
Every Slashdot reader knew going into this election that the Diebold machines were unaccountable, had no unalterable audit logs, no paper to subpoena, no WORM media to recount from. They are rewriteable and they are in the hands of the GOP. Now, suddenly, only two states have a vote count which is wildly divergent from the exit polling. Those states are Ohio and Florida. They were polled entirely by Diebold machines.
There is no accountability, no log, no going back. And it's OUR fault. We knew, and we didn't take action. We KNEW this would come.
It's not about who votes. It's about who counts them.
Although I am against Bush, I would prefer him winning the vote in a straight way, I can live with that. I can't live with the fact that he might have stolen the election for a second time.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
they could find all the evidence they need of record tampering... of votes being miscast... of these machines being totally unfit for the democratic process....
and you would never see anything about it in the mainstream media....
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Yep. Get ready for the Diebold conspiracy wackos to crawl out of the woodwork, because Diebold's chairman said in his capacity as a Republican party backer that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Really, really poor taste? Yep. Probably a fucking stupid thing to say when you're CEO of a company that makes electronic voting machines? For the *state* about which you're making those comments, no less? Yep. But don't forget one thing: the exit polls exactly and perfectly describe the 2% Bush margin. That's one thing you'll never see the Diebold conspiracy blogs mention. They'll just fantasize about how a 13,000 person company secretly rigged the election, and that somehow, the mainstream media is "hiding" the story because it's in bed with Bush. Ahh, conspiracy theorists. Gotta love 'em.
Interestingly, they showed footage on NBC's TODAY show of some of the polling places using electronic equipment in Ohio; some polling places had waits of over 9 hours with the last people voting at shortly before 4AM local time. Voting officials offered the alternative of paper ballots to move people through more quickly. Ironically, students and other members of the line were yelling "Do not use the paper ballots! Wait to use the machines!" explaining later that they felt their votes wouldn't be counted if they voted on paper...
And no, the exit polls didn't indicate a different winner.
The audit of the unprecedented use of electronic voting would be a pretty good learning experience for us as a potential nation of future electronic voters.
However, I wonder what the potential political repercussions of an audit would be should the audit find inconsistencies or possible voter problems that skewed a state to the candidate that lost after the fact. Would Kerry renounce his concession?
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
Please forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that for all the investigations that examined the "tricks" used to fudge the numbers (some of which we already know were repeated this time before the polls even opened yesterday) it still didn't mean the shrub was stripped of his presidency ... And it doesn't look like it secured a more honest democratic process four years later, either.
It is completely useless to have electronic voting logs/records if there is no paper trail to back it up. Without a paper trail, a completely fake vote tally would look just like the real thing.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I was kinda surprised that I hadn't seen more about people questioning the voting systems, especially after exit polls seemed to reflect a different story than vote counts.
I guess we'll see what happens....
I'll be interested to see what the results are and if this gets any traction in the media
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
It seems fishy to me that the two states with computerized balloting and no paper trail, had Kerry winning in the exit polls, but the outcome was decidedly different. In fact these two states had the highest discrepancy in exit poll vs. final poll numbers.
I voted on an electronic doohickey (sorry; couldn't find the maker, but the logo looked like a lowercase "h", dotted like a lowercase "i"). There was one booth for people to vote on paper, and I was seriously considering asking to use it instead of the electronic booths... If someone with sufficient privileges wanted to change my vote after it'd been recorded electronically, it wouldn't take much, and no audit would bring it up.
I don't think it should be legal to concede. Screw checking out the voting machines, and have all the uncounted voters sue Kerry, Bush, and whomever else. By conceding the race and not counting those votes, it's effectively denying the right to vote for those individuals. This includes overseas (military and civilian), uncounted provisional votes, and absentee ballots. Every vote counts, so count every vote!
I remember that software when I was in middle school. back in the good ole days when wardialers were the newest thing
Hopefully everyone will comply with this order.
There are too many questions about electronic voting, and the legitimacy of the election in question. If these requests are not filled, it will really help to calm down the cries of voting fraud.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
...please provide [the items] in increments as soon as you have them.
(from TFA)
I guess it will take more than 4 years before they have gathered enough informations to come to any conclusions.
I don't read replies by ACs.
The thing that amazes me is how much all of this is going to cost. Lawyers will need to pour through the information request in each jurisdiction, someone technical will have to get the requested info out of the systems (if that's possible), and every nitpicky error in the logs will require some justification to demonstrate that it didn't affect the vote tallys. What on earth is the point? Do they honestly think that there is something unscrupulous going on? It can't be worse than trying to decide which hanging chads count and which don't...
"- Don't concede: Candidates, make a statement about voting without auditing. Hold off on your concession until the canvass is done". they say. May I laugh? Finally, people who understand technology wish to discuss with the machines themselves what actually happened. I don't care what the logs end up showing; I laud the initiative. Maybe we can advance from there.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
I think that any place that used any sort of electronic voting should be made aware that they're going to be under a microscpoe because of it. Complying with lots of FOI requests needs to be an expensive part of the TCO for Diebold machines, and their ilk.
See what I've been reading.
Public Records Request - November 2, 2004
From: Black Box Voting
To: Elections division
Pursuant to public records law and the spirit of fair, trustworthy, transparent elections, we request the following documents.
We are requesting these as a nonprofit, noncommercial group acting in the capacity of a news and consumer interest organization, and ask that if possible, the fees be waived for this request. If this is not possible, please let us know which records will be provided and the cost. Please provide records in electronic form, by e-mail, if possible - crew@blackboxvoting.org.
We realize you are very, very busy with the elections canvass. To the extent possible, we do ask that you expedite this request, since we are conducting consumer audits and time is of the essence.
We request the following records.
Item 1. All notes, emails, memos, and other communications pertaining to any and all problems experienced with the voting system, ballots, voter registration, or any component of your elections process, beginning October 12, through November 3, 2004.
Item 2. Copies of the results slips from all polling places for the Nov. 2, 2004 election. If you have more than one copy, we would like the copy that is signed by your poll workers and/or election judges.
Item 3: The internal audit log for each of your Unity, GEMS, WinEds, Hart Intercivic or other central tabulating machine. Because different manufacturers call this program by different names, for purposes of clarification we mean the programs that tally the composite of votes from all locations.
Item 4: If you are in the special category of having Diebold equipment, or the VTS or GEMS tabulator, we request the following additional audit logs:
a. The transmission logs for all votes, whether sent by modem or uploaded directly. You will find these logs in the GEMS menu under "Accuvote OS Server" and/or "Accuvote TS Server"
b. The "audit log" referred to in Item 3 for Diebold is found in the GEMS menu and is called "Audit Log"
c. All "Poster logs". These can be found in the GEMS menu under "poster" and also in the GEMS directory under Program Files, GEMS, Data, as a text file. Simply print this out and provide it.
d. Also in the Data file directory under Program Files, GEMS, Data, please provide any and all logs titled "CCLog," "PosterLog", and Pserver Log, and any logs found within the "Download," "Log," "Poster" or "Results" directories.
e. We are also requesting the Election Night Statement of Votes Cast, as of the time you stopped uploading polling place memory cards for Nov. 2, 2004 election.
Item 5: We are requesting every iteration of every interim results report, from the time the polls close until 5 p.m. November 3.
Item 6: If you are in the special category of counties who have modems attached, whether or not they were used and whether or not they were turned on, we are requesting the following:
a. internal logs showing transmission times from each voting machine used in a polling place
b. The Windows Event Viewer log. You will find this in administrative tools, Event Viewer, and within that, print a copy of each log beginning October 12, 2004 through Nov. 3, 2004.
Item 7: All e-mails, letters, notes, and other correspondence between any employee of your elections division and any other person, pertaining to your voting system, any anomalies or problems with any component of the voting system, any written communications with vendors for any component of your voting system, and any records pertaining to upgrades, improvements, performance enhancement or any other changes to your voting system, between Oct. 12, 2004 and Nov. 3, 2004.
Item 8: So that we may efficiently clarify any questions pertaining to your specific county, please provide letterhead for the most recent non-confidential correspondence between your office and your county counsel, or, in lieu of this, just e-mail us the contact information for y
The FOIA allows agencies to charge a reasonable "copying" fee for labor and material. $2-$3 per page is not out of the question my experience. Image the fee for printing or copying millions of ballots.
I wish them luck in their efforts to get this info. As another Slashdotter posted in the other election thread, it's amazing how no one in the media wants to talk about how the exit polls, which are normally quite accurate, showed Kerry strong in places where he eventually lost. I won't rehash all the Diebold issues, but in an election this close, some modest vote fraud, spread thinly enough, would be more than enough to sway the result.
I do wonder, though where they're gonna find the manpower to process all this data, if they do succeed. The recounts in a few Florida counties took days; this is a few orders of magnatude more work!
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
First, no, the exit polls do not suggest that. They perfectly mirror the results.
Secondly, Diebold's CEO, Walden O'Dell, said that about only Ohio, because he lives and works in Ohio, and is a GOP backer.
Bad taste? Yes. "Interesting" that a CEO of a company is a Republican? Nope. Do I wish he would have had the scruples to stay out of politics since his company is making voting machines? Yep.
But please, take off your tinfoil hat. When he said he was committed to delivering Ohio to Bush, he meant that as a GOP campaigner, contributor, and backer. Not that he was going to secretly have a 13,000-employee company rig a presidential election.
Who are these people, requesting so much information?! They must be terrorists!
Do not anger the worm.
Bonus points for tying it all together!
The election yesterday was my third experience with the new-improved voting machines. And for the third time, I walked out of the booth wondering if my vote would really be counted.
After tapping my choices with a stylus -not really that easy for a left-handed-choice-tapper on a right-handed machine, I had to re-do a lot of them- I pressed the vote button. And the screen flashed something like "vote recorded" and then it went blank.
There was nothing to drop in a ballot box, nothing to show me that the machine was really hooked to anything, and of course, nothing that anybody could re-count if there was a question of fraud.
The friendly octogenarian on duty assured my that the it was all run by computer and that we didn't need a paper trail, since they could recount the computer records if they needed to do a recount. And since it is impossible for hard drives to die and memory chips to fail...
Yeah, it probably worked this time but the empty feeling I had as I walked out of the polling station left me strangly envious of those days when I could look at my punch card to make sure that none of the chads were hanging.
I live in a country where 36.6 million people are registered as voters.
- sealed-urn ?
Every 5 years, we vote for our president and sometimes mayors / deputies as well.
It takes roughly 3 hours after the closing of the voting offices before we know the name of our president, without room for contestations over the regularity of the vote.
How come we can achieve that by using such a primitive method as ballot-paper-goes-into-ballot-enveloppe-goes-into
Don't be surprised when these requests are denied on the grounds that providing this information would compromise our ability to prevent vote fraud. (my head spins just typing that)
The radical right now control the White House, the Senate and the House. Some of the senators voted in last night make Barry Goldwater look like Ted Kennedy. This faction will not allow anyone to look behind the curtain.
Please people ... stop your bitchin ...
They would have to find 3.5 million votes +
Let the conspiracy theories begin...
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
4 MORE YEARS! Wait a minute, before you mark this troll or flamebait. I'm talking about 4 MORE YEARS OF SLASHDOT! Slashdot has been on the verge of death lately and probably couldn't survive a Kerry victory. With another 4 more years of Bush, Slashdot is virtually guaranteed an extra 2-5 stories per week that generate 1300+ comments and thus traffic and ad revenue. Look in the HOF, all the top stories are politically related. Thanks to Bush's victory, Slashdot will generate enough add revenue to continue. We should all be happy.
I just sent in my $100 donation. Put your money with your mouth is.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's interesting that this "get out the vote" campaign which was so championed by the lib media and Hollywood because they figured "everyone hates Bush so the more ignorant teenagers we convince to vote, the better" didn't quite pan out, now did it.
The democratic party got reamed yesterday. Positively reamed. The friggin' House minority leader got shafted for the first time in 50 years. The GOP holds a majority on both the House and Senate, and they won more governor races.
What these things do is suggest there is some kind of evil conspiracy to elect Bush at all costs and ignores the bigger picture. That'd be a mighty big conspiracy, if you ask me.
The horse is dead. Fuck it or walk away, but stop beating it.
Last night on PBS the pollsters were saying that their exit polls favored a Kerry victory, and they were disappointed by how wrong the polling was.
The exit polls favored Kerry by 1-3 percentage points but the "votes" favored Bush.
If the elections were rigged, those unexpected gaps between polls and votes are what you would expect in a well rigged election.
I don't know that the elections were rigged. How many of you have played Tropico (where you get to rig elections and so forth)?
It wouldn't be the first fraudulent US election (Lyndon Johnson rigged the vote in Texas).
You don't think the Kerry campaign, and all the shitloads of people working for it, realizes this?
A $300M operation that's been going on for the better part of two years, for whom 55 million people voted and believe that the future of the country is at stake?
They're just going to roll over and say "Oh well" for no reason?
I have news for you: there is not wholesale or widespread fraud in the election. And what fraud (on BOTH sides), inappropriate behavior, etc., is statistically irrelevant in this election. If Kerry believed there was a way to win, believe me, they'd be doing it.
I hate to break it to you, but the geek community isn't "on to" something big, and everyone else just doesn't realize it. Electronic voting has problems. Big problems. We need transparency. Blackboxvoting is fighting for it.
But no one stole, or was handed, this election. Bush won it, with the largest number of votes in history, with an absolute majority, and with additional seats in the House and Senate to boot.
Face it. Bush won. Keep working on making electronic voting open and transparent.
And you know what? When you do, Republican candidates can and will still win.
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/sta tes/FL/P/00/county.001.html#12086
IIRC, they are using touch-screens there.
Miami-Dade was supposed to be incredibly Democratic and they only got a 54-46 margin.
Very suspect.
We absolutely need transparency in the election process so that the electorate will have faith in the election process. And we all need to raise the issue about these Diebold machines and any others that don't leave a paper trail as being unverifiable, un-recountable, and subject to manipulation. So I think what BlackBox is doing is fantastic.
BUT... If this inquiry is tied to partisan bickering and whining by deluded Kerry-supporters who loudly proclaim their belief that somehow this information will reveal some sort of conspiracy that will reverse the recent 100,000+ vote victory margin for Bush in Ohio, then it will actually be counter-productive. Tranparency in elections and election equipment will become a partisan issue pitting Democrats against Republicans instead of being a non-partisan call for transparency that the enter population should be willing to support.
"To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it." -- Olin Miller
Speaking as a Kerry supporter...
#1, The election results were statistically similar to the exit polls in Ohio and Florida.
#2, only 20 out of 88 counties in Ohio (IIRC, I may be fudgy on the exact number) used Diebold machines, the rest were punch card ballots.
"America has done some terrible things. But I know that Americans don't cheer when innocents die." -Dave Barry
Really? The same MSM that ran forged documents in an attempt to derail the Bush campaign? Please, the MSM would be all over it.
In my Florida county, there are verified reports of users that selected Kerry; the machine asked them to confirm their vote for Bush. They repeated this proccess ten times before demanding a vote for Kerry, how many older voters did not notice this.
The touch screen area for the Kerry icon was so small that you had to had a pencil eraser to select Kerry, while almost anywhere on the screen would select Bush!
It's too bad that Kerry has conceded the race, as it seems reasonable and worthwhile to check the accuracy of the electronic votes. However, the U.S. has a deep anti-intellectual bias and it's not surprising to me that the idea of simple factchecking of an important race seems intolerable.
The machine that tallied my vote (Satellite Beach, FL) wasn't from Diebold. A bunch of us in line were wondering why there were'nt even voting machines. Just a marker and a paper ballot being tallied by a scanner.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
69 of Ohio's 88 counties still use old fashioned paper punch card ballots.
Voting Machine OS project? Talk about somewhere that Open Source COULD have a major impact. Plus, kick Diebold's a$$ to boot!
"Be kind, for everyone you meet is facing a great battle." - Philo of Alexandria -
Damn straight. This wasn't a landslide, but it wasn't any small victory either. 3.5 million people more liked Bush than Kerry, and the electoral vote was actually closer than it should have been because of the extreme concentration of votes on both sides of the divide. If Bush's votes had been spread across the whole country more evenly, it would have been more like 375 rather than the 286 it looks to be now.
Ohio is the best shot to prove out fraud for the Dems. On the Republican side, Michigan, PA, and WI all have slight margins of victory - less than Ohio in at least 2 of those cases. We'll probably never know, and Bush really can't lose. I doubt any of the aforementioned Blue states will switch with a heavy investigation or recount, but it would be interesting to find out what the real story is there.
Kerry would be wise to walk away, and it looks like he has done just that. Not that he's going to get a chance to run again, but at least he will be able to keep his Senate seat, for what it's worth being in a 55-44-1 Senate.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
I will try and make this quick as I know others have plenty to say on this issue. One of my friends, a former business colleague who later became a good friend, is one of the project managers for Diebold Election Systems. I would challenge anyone here to find a more honest and upright person. It is somewhat alarming to see people blaming this election on voting machines. Yes, it is possible that the election was effected by the machines. It is also possible that the machines were "tampered with". You must also realize that it's within belief these acts were not purposeful, but instead accidental. Once in awhile machines do get in a bollixed condition. It is important to make sure the machines were not messing up the votes--I agree. With that said, I must say many are sounding like the quintessential sore losers. Even if the election results were changed via voting machine fraud, do you really expect to make a case that it was enough to change the outcome. There are always mistakes made. There are always things that go wrong. There have always been. There will always be. You are not serving the cause of good by whining and crying and acting like two year olds wanting one more piece of candy. Grow up. Act like men and women not children. Republicans should be happy today, but should refrain from shoving their victory in the losers' collective faces. There is also such a thing as a sore winner, desu ne? Democrats should be sad today, but energized to work even harder to see their world view come true. It does not serve your cause well to act as though you refuse to see reality and finding any reason, ANY REASON, to say the election was stolen from your hands. Be grown ups and shake hands with the winners and start again. All things in life need balance. This political race was one of imbalance. It is time for the world to look upon itself in the mirror and start anew. Release the hatred. Release the anger. Act as humans, not as enemies. The Digital Samurai
"may our descendants prosper and become notable, not through fortune or fame, but through love and deed."
Not to sound like too much of a conspiracy freak, but I have to say that some of the numbers sound kinda flaky -- e.g. there was supposedly no change in turnout of young voters, but the news was *full* of anecdotal evidence of massive youth voter turnout... Also, the numbers from Florida just look a little... weird.
It's very, very good that these guys are doing this -- it's just too easy to imagine "election hacking" scenarios.
FYR: Some very good analysis of the problem, with resources, from Bruce Schneier: http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0312.html#9
can anyone expect to process and audit that data in a reasonable timeframe?
Not to affect this election but perhaps they will come up with valid criticisms which will result in improvements that contribute to enhancing the reliability of future electronic elections and not just in the USA but world wide. With a bit of luck the NeoCons of this world will eventually have to learn to live with something as 'communist' and disgustingly 'liberal' but eminently democratic as open source voting software/hardware and fully audited elections.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I also find it surprising that Florida was so clearly for Bush given how tight it was last time. (Maybe retirees care more about terrorism and Iraq than I thought?)
Much of Ohio uses Diebold voting machines, which leave no paper trail. Early in the campaign, Diebold CEO Walden O'Dell, a GOP fundraiser, promised to deliver Ohio to Bush. :(
Question: If someone committed fraud, would it be better to make it a decisive victory in order to avoid scrutiny?
These guys should start with the big counties in states such as Florida and Ohio that seemed to turn out contrary to prediction.
As an european observer, I see elections in America these days with amazement :
1. voters can be deleted from the lists en masse, as the name of their party is written down. Therefore the secrecy isn't preserved.
2. use of electronic devices the quality and neutrality of which are very difficult to check. The easiness with which such devices can be made to give fake results is proverbial.
As for the current elections, noone knows whether some of these machines aren't biased.
Therefore the fairness of these machines is not insured.
3. Polls and partial results are given while people are still voting. The temptation to influence their choice at the crucial moment is enormous, as has been shown by Fox News, which was announcing 269 electors for Bush, in order to galvanize republican troops and indecise voters in swing states. The voters are influenced by partial results at the very moment they are voting.
Therefore the neutrality of the electoral process is not insured.
To sum up:
1. The secrecy of opinions isn't preserved.
2. The fairness of voting devices is not insured.
3. The neutrality of the electoral process is not insured.
The foundations of democracy are clearly shattered by such failures in an electoral system.
For the country which likes to claim to be the largest democracy in the world, it's a shame.
If America is the greatest country in the world, with it's freedoms and the right to vote, why can't they decide on a consistent form of voting? It seems to be, watching from the outside, there were so many different ways to vote, depending on where you were, whether it was electronic voting machines (and each of those were from different vendors)or paper ballots. In addition, the whole confusion and legal challenges to "provisional" and "absentee" ballots just muddied the waters even further. I also find it scary that something so important as voting can be done using hap-hazard machinery which is unauditable and unreliable. Hearing some of the stories coming from the different news agencies (CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.), it almost sounds like the voting system is a 3rd world style system.
What's needed is a voting system that's consistent across the country with checks and balances to ensure audit trails. I know that Americans take pride in the fact they vote for their government. Their system needs to be first class to ensure their vote doesn't become a circus. The American government need to ensure validity of the vote by ensuring voting is done in a consistent manner across the country, and if that is electronic voting, then they need to ensure the voting results are NOT subject to fraud or manipulation.
Please note this is not a "bashing America" rant, but the zaniness about electronic voting has to stop!
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Move to Canada or whatever, but Bush won - by a large margin. Get over it.
None of this will change anything.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
What I find amazing is that the fuss is being made only after election day. Apparently, the people of the USA were perfectly at ease with votes being counted by unreliable machines - until the results of the elections came in. Now that the results are in, they are suddenly casting doubt on the validity of these results. If there was any doubt about the integrity of the election results, this should have been addressed before the first vote was cast.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Don't sweat it, sour grapes is simply a psychological coping mechanism and serves as an acceptable, safe outlet.
Where do they take the exit polls at? In Iowa, I think that they did the exit polling in Des Moines - the states "urban" Democratic area, but not in the rural areas. If this was done across the country, would it have been enough to show one candidate winning the exit polling while another candidate wins the vote?
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Note that the link at the top of the main page for credit card donations only accepts US addresses. If you are like me from another country that belives this election will influence us all, you can find a PayPal link here that will allow international payments.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
I was pretty excited to see that Virginia wasn't using Diebold machines in the voting booths. I was happy to see the WinVote machines. They looked slick, they worked fine and I had no complaints.
This morning I looked into the company and found out that it is run by 2 former Diebold executives.
I really don't like that too much.
I thought FOI applied only to getting data from Federal agencies. Why would states be compelled to fulfill FOIA requests?
We need a voter-verifiable paper receipt printed out by these machines that ensures manual recounts and spot-checks can occur without any hint of vote count fraud. The fact that there is any controversy in this area is indicative of just how sloppy we as a country have become in protecting our fundamental processes of government. We've put men on the moon, we have the expertise to put printers in voting machines.
Have you donated to the EFF lately?
My journal
From outside the United States "American democracy" is right up there with "jumbo shrimp" and "plastic glass".
Quite true, because I simply cannot afford getting that 40% of my salary back that I used to have before this asshole took power and did nothing while the economy slammed into an iceberg.
No I don't think the election was rigged, but I do think that people in this country are incredibly naive. The top two issues for Bush supported were "Morals" and "Iraq." In other words the GOP has convinced them that if Kerry won then we'd be eaten by wolves and sodomized by packs of roaming gays.
I'm shopping around for a new country to call home. This one has gone absolutely crazy.
Now, suddenly, only two states have a vote count which is wildly divergent from the exit polling. Those states are Ohio and Florida.
Actually, the results were quite in line with the exit polls. (Florida, Ohio)
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
There's a lot of people who are arguing that the election was 'stolen' by Diebold others who say that things are just fine...
The bottom line is -- until we look and until there's a paper trail we just don't know.
For all we know, Diebold could be sucking votes out of the system like a cancer sucking the life out of a body. Do we just turn our heads and not go to the doctor for a test? We do need to know what happened in an objective, non-partisan manner. Perhaps Bev Harris is the one to do that, maybe not, but it needs to be done.
Additionally, we need to fix the voting system. We need to form a true non-partisan grass roots effort to get accountability back into the system. I don't want people to ever question the results of an election. We need to have ballot initiatives lawsuits, whatever. I'm not an expert on how to force these changes on the voting system, but I'm willing to learn and it needs to be done.
Everyone please submit this as a news tip to CNN, here I want to see this make it into the mainstream media. The average person on the street needs to know about this!
This is my sig, there are many like it, but this one is mine...
I have to hand it to Karl Rove, he truly stood on the shoulders of giants.
Excuse me, the vote was not as I stated conducted completely on Diebold machines. But that's hardly the issue.
You don't need to control all the voting machines to swing 1% of the votes. You only need a few counties. A few counties and no audit logs. If history tells this election truthfully, it will be the election of "Nobody Knows Who Won".
By lying?
No, actually, I was up until 5AM ET.
And, uh, the networks didn't "revise" anything. The problem was that pre-election polling in states like Ohio made some people, like Zogby, pretty damned sure Ohio was a gimme for Kerry. But they were wrong. And the exit polling showed that.
Now let me get this straight: you're alleging that the major networks changed their exit polling figures, i.e., purposely falsified results, to make the exit poll numbers match the election outcome?
Wow. Do you use Reynolds or a generic brand for your hat?
I hate to tell you this, but I watched the AP returns on Ohio from the poll close to 100% precincts reporting, and the exit polls more or less mirrored the results the whole time.
But now people like Zogby are having to are having to eat their hats:
"We feel strongly that our pre-election polls were accurate on virtually every state. Our predictions on many of the key battleground states like Ohio and Florida were within the margin of error. I thought we captured a trend, but apparently that result didn't materialize."
Like the dems are any more interested in open source and fair use.
yeah, right.
... massive quantities of crystal meth really does make one paranoid delusional.
I did a couple of searches on my own, and found this (old) article: http://slate.msn.com/id/2086455/.
It's basically about Diebold machines being flaky pieces of crap, but most notably, there's this quote:
Anyhow, I find it amusing that a pro OpenSource article is on a Microsoft site (kind of like finding a supremely pro Microsoft article on Slashdot..
- - - -
KickingDragon
Did you?
This is why bush won
http://homepage.mac.com/the_macman/voting_M.wmv
While i admire their quest, the position is weak. Statements such as "Since RAS is not adequately protected.." do not hold water with me. Why? Independent of my polical position, I expect to see some real technical merits to this, something they currently lack. I am certianly not saying e-voting is crack proof - nothing is - but at minimum they should come to the table with a valid position.
Let them validate, it will put to rest the fear mongering.
So before you flame or mod me, read my post.
How many of you have a clue as to how an election is run? How many of you have a clue as to the repeatability of recount results? How many of you have taken the time to call the elections office before an election and sign up as a pollworker? How many of you have gone to the courthouse and witnessed the *public* logic and accuracy tests of the ballot counters before and after the elections. Never heard of such a thing? Doesn't surprise me.
I worked in the elections business for 3 years, and not for Diebold. I was project leader designing a high speed central count machine. I designed the read heads and the digital logic. I've been to probably 10-12 elections across the country and Canada. What I've seen consistantly is dedicated, hardworking and impartial people running the elections. These people bust their butt to do a fast and accurate job election night, and they continue the effort until the election results are certified, usually a couple weeks later. The results are accurate and repeatable. Most states have laws requiring manditory recounts in elections that are close. The ballot counting process is considerably more accurate than the recount threshold.
What blackboxvoting.org is doing will undoubtably (based on my observations) just result in a gigantic waste of time and effort. I can only imagine that it's a grandstanding effort to raise their visibility. It will ulimately result in questions as to their credibility.
If you have questions about the election process, by all means call your elections office and talk to the people there, go to the public equipment tests and ask questions. You will find out for yourself that you are dealing with people that do a good job and produce accurate results.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Checking if the votes were counted correctly is a good thing to do, yes.
But, if you are suggesting that the US is anti-intellectual then you are wrong. What the US is against is a clearly pompous and vile attitude to the mainstream population. I go to a major university in the Seattle, WA area and I can assure you I am not anti-intellectual though I am definately anti many of my professors. Because they all act like I am a cretin and they are the cream of the Earth.
Much like John Kerry ran his campaign and used his language. He slapped his intellect upon those below him. He looks down upon his followers as though they were sheep--at least to me. He is an example of the liberal elite.
Eriudite, but foolish.
Compassionate, but selfish.
Educated, but no commonsense.
They, like many "intellectuals" may have lots of book knowledge, but little in the way of world knowledge. Of course, they will be the first to tell you they know a great deal about the world.
One thing you can know is true, a truly great man will never tell you they are great. You will know it through actions. You will know it through things others say about them. You can be sure to know the opposite is true if they tell you first. At least most of the time.
Check the machines, yes. BUT, do not think the US is anti-intellectual. We are merely anti-elitist.
"may our descendants prosper and become notable, not through fortune or fame, but through love and deed."
There are no Federal elections in the United States; all elections occur at the State level or below. Since the Federal Government doesn't run elections, they won't have any documentmation about them.
As a matter of fact, it's a historical accident that the People vote for President at all:
Perhaps it would be better for everyone if the State legislatures just nominated the Electors themselves instead of leaving it to the People.
Which elector is this? I live in Colorado, and check the newspapers' websites daily, and have not heard of anything like this here. In West Virginia, yes, but not in Colorado. Could you cite a source, please?
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
(See my other post here)
So, are you, too, alleging that CNN falsified its exit polling numbers? Because that's what i get from your allegations.
Is it that hard to believe that polling might have indicated one thing in certain areas and another thing in others? The exit polling dipped and rose with the actual election returns, and there was always a ~+/-5% margin of error.
But the final, aggregated numbers more or less match the actual results. Are you saying that CNN has fudged these to match, i.e., lying about the numbers, meaning they are manufacturing artificial exit poll data? And if you are, what possible motivation would they have to do that?
If there was a big discrepancy, they'd (not to mention the $300 million Kerry campaign) want to be all the fuck over it...ESPECIALLY in the state that is deciding the election.
So I hate to break it to you, but Bush won, and there was nothing fishy to speak of going on.
(Disclaimer: I didn't vote for Bush.)
Subject of parent should read "The discrepancy was slight".
I don't believe there is a law that says concession is a finality. I imagine if we find otherwise, Kerry could easily step up and assert his presidency. He conceded for the same reason Al Gore did, out of concern for the well-being of a divided country; and not because he necessarily thought he had truly lost.
What?
Because that's a great use of government resources. It's nice to see the same people who complain about government waste are happy to engage in it themselves.
The proportions of this are becoming epic. After the 2000 election, every country in the world was laughing at us. "Look at them, they want the rest of the world to hold free and fair elections and they can't even agree that they're going on in their own country." Now we have these crackpots raking this shit up again! WTF people? I didn't vote for George Bush either, but I have plenty of faith that the Democratic party will make sure that the election wasn't rigged in favor of a Republican and vice versa. Take off the tinfoil hats and get a friggin' life!
They just received a response:
Dear BlackBoxVoting.org,
Your name sounds very ominous. Are you a terrorist organization? No matter, we will soon find out.
Your request for audit logs and other miscellaneous data has been rejected. We feel that providing this information to the public would allow terrorists a clear view inside our political process, which they might then use to influence future elections. We cannot allow that to happen, therefore, the logs will be kept under lock and key until a time far in the future when no one today will be alive to be held accountable for any mistakes.
In addition, we feel your questioning of the voting process undermines the public's faith in our democratic system and we wouldn't want any facts or numbers to confuse people and cause them to lose faith, would we? We also feel that no one should ever question the government, because anyone who does so is obviously out to destroy America and that's just wrong. Who does that?
The FBI, CIA, NSA, DOD, IRS, SEC, DHS, AFSPC, ANG, ATF, BOP, CBIAC, CDC, and OSHA will all be paying you a visit to "straighten things out."
Thank you for your time.
Your Government.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
How exactly are the exit polls conducted? What is the margin of error? I'm just an ignorant Canuck and applaud the request by the blackboxvoting.org members, but could it be quite possible that the tin foil hats are coming out too soon?
Because the United States is not one country, but is a federation of fifty countries. Each country (called a "state") is completely at liberty to choose whatever method of appointing Presidential Electors as they want. According to the US Constitution, the People don't even have a say-- the Legislature of each State gets to choose the method of appointing Electors.
I distinctly heard much being made about exit polls showing Kerry to be much farther ahead than he was, in fact Ron Silver said he knew of many instances where a man would vote for Bush, but tell family, friends, and presumably pollsters that he voted for Kerry. There were shenanigans aplenty, but that merely follows tradition.
I'm OK with that. If the software is certified for a particular set of Windows + patches, then on election night I want it running on that exact platform - not that system +/- a few minor "adjustments".
and use RAS (Remote Access Server) to connect to the voting machines through telephone lines.
One detail left out: did it answer calls from every phone number in existence, or just the ones on an approved list?
I don't mean to imply that everything was hunky-dorey, but the facts you mentioned (on their own) don't necessarily mean that the system was compromised.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You're assuming that exit polling is an unbiased process; it isn't.
People don't have to talk to exit pollers, they can tell them to get stuffed. I imagine Republican voters are more likely to do that (perceiving the media -- especially PBS -- as left-leaning and not worth wasting their breath on) than Democrats.
People can also lie to exit pollers, too, for similar reasons, or to avoid (perceived) peer pressure (a Republican voting in a predominantly Democrat precinct, say). There are reasons that the balloting process is private -- exit polls violate that privacy. Sure, some people don't care, but you're not going to get an accurate exit poll from those that do.
-- Alastair
Four years ago it was Sore Loserman. Now it's Sore Nerd-o-man. Until the libs can accept that the country isn't yours you will just have to Get Over It!
A local poll worker gave me a copy of the "tape" she printed out after the polls close.
Where I live we use "optical scan" ballots and have a counter at each polling place. The voter drops his ballot in the counter, and at the end of the day the judge turns off the machine and prints out a tape with the results. If there's a recount, they can do it by hand or by machine.
It's a very good system. It doesn't meet all the ADA and multilingual requirements that a touch screen with a voter-verified printout meets, but it's a lot cheaper.
America has spoken! John Kerry is a giant douche!
they could find all the evidence they need of record tampering... of votes being miscast... of these machines being totally unfit for the democratic process....
I think the totals will prove correct enough to give Bush the presidency. Unfortunately there's no law against forcing voters in opposition precincts to wait in longer lines than everyone else. I heard on CNN that many in Ohio waited over 9 hours to vote. We can claim election fraud but the law provides no remedy if our claims prove correct. All that matters is votes cast. So you're right of course.
and you would never see anything about it in the mainstream media....
Yeah. They're pretty well forced to be either nonpartisan or agree with the government. Plus it's not economical to piss off half your viewers. Glad we have the independent media.
Watch them take 4 years to hand over all the requested information.
As a non-American, that is what boggles the mind.
With everything going on, the election is decided on "moral issues"? Me no understand...although, you gotta hand it to Bush's campaign people for realizing near the end that it was the only type of campaign they could win.
Reason why there is hope for the future generation #364:
"I wish my grass was emo so it could cut itself."
During the election, someone should have set himself up in a public phone booth somewhere (in oreder to be untraceable later), hacked the Windows server (god knows it's easy enough), and hacked some of the votes to produce wild results such as Nader winning Florida and Ohio, so that fraud would have been obvious....
Or maybe that is in fact what happened, except that the hackers were sitting in Diebold's offices, with a hack to the servers on the one side and a line to karl Rove on the other. Would it really have been so difficult to "tweak" the results so that , for example, for every 1 Democratic vote, 0.05 votes, or even 0.005 votes were given to the Republicans, but only counted when it reached a whole number? Since this would produce the off chance that there would be more votes than registered voters, maybe it would have simply been easier to subtract 0.0005 Democratic votes for every Republican vote but only make it count once it reached a whole number.
Any beginning programmer could do this, and a good one could hide the code, say in the firmware or hardware of the Diebold voting machines.
... if all the people that voted electronically voted for the current minority candidate, would the results be different?
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that the answer is yes. Then you have a problem. Not only is the vote counting methodology used in the electronic systems fairly easy to subvert, but the methods to do so are a.) well published, and b.) done correctly, nearly impossible to detect. And that discounts other rigging methods (if (date == ELECTION_DAY) { tmp = MAX(bush.votes, kerry.votes); kerry.votes = MIN(bush.votes, kerry.votes); bush.votes = tmp; } or if (rand()/RAND_MAX 0.49) { kerry.votes++; } else { bush.votes++; } ).
So what are you going to do? Cleverly, manual recount is out of the question. Throw another $4 billion at getting it done right? I doubt that. Now is a great time for voter fraud because nobody has the stomach for "another Florida". I'm sure most would just as well assume not to look into it.
Even if there was fraud in the electronic systems and we discounted them entirely, a frightening number of people still voted for Bush. Considering his past performance you can only conclude that there's a fairly large portion of the voting populace that thought Bush was the best candidate and would likely welcome the fraud (based on their general acceptance of fraud and perjury perpetrated by the candidate during the execution of his job) if it helped him win.
Chalk one up for all those "terrorists" out there. They wanted Bush to win so badly. I'm sure they had no direct influence on the election, but they'll be pleased with the result all the same.
And here's to sticking it to the rest of the world, America! Allies? Friends? BAH! What do we need them for? Bush is already his own best friend! Really, who would Jesus bomb?
here's a thought: maybe the electors should describe what they value in a president and who they prefer so that we can actually elect them as the system claims we do. There were no electors on my ballot and if there are any around I don't know anything about them. If this was done, what sort of election? check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_v ote for one of several methods designed to proportionally represent voters.
Or we could allow the electoral vote for each state to split. I like this because then the state doesn't tell everyone who didn't vote for the winner that their opinion doesn't matter.
Or we could submit a list of contests between the candidates to be judged fairly by somebody else (arm wrestling, sprinting, riddle contest, spelling bee, whatever). at least then we would be able to see everything happen and have more trust that no one cheated unfairly.
Or we could just have each member of the Supreme Court flip a coin and compare.
I think we need to carefully examine the process and the equipment, and fix what needs it. Of course, officials will be unwilling to change the very rules that got them into office.
Where touch screens were used, people had to wait in line hours and hours. Many gave up.
The lack of a paper trail is completely wrong. WE all know how fallable hardware and software can be.
My voting experience for the last few elections has been based on 30 year old technology and works great.
Quincy uses paper ballots; you use a felt marker to connect a line on an arrow pointing towards your candidate.
The paper is legal size (larger than 8.5 x 11) so there's plenty of room. No butterfly ballot needed.
They ask for your name/address (but no id) before giving you the ballot. A second check, different people, before giving the ballot to the machine.
The machine reads the ballot (presumably) and displays a satisfying ballot count (I was number 138 at 8am yesterday).
No hanging chads. Simple, proven optical technology. Recounts just a matter of refeeding in the ballots.
I can't see how touch screens would be any faster, even in an ideal world. Imagine what it'll be like in a couple of years, after those touch screens have gotten bounced around a few times ... I hate touch screens on ATMs and banks have the money to keep them properly repaired.
I think this country needs voting reform even before it needs true campaign reform. No voting, short of a face-to-face visible show of hands, will ever be secure or perfect ... but paper ballots and simple technology is much more confidence inspiring than these touch screens. America should standardize on simple, effective, confidence inspiring methods.
Howard M. Lewis Ship -- Independent J2EE / Open-Source Java Consultant -- Creator, Apache Tapestry and HiveMind
Pollsters generally understand this. Nearly random sampling is difficult and uneconomical. The results you normally see are not exact ratios of people polled, but are a prediction based on the polls that attempts to remove bias. Poll X people in a representative sampling of precincts, take a guess about the people who refused to take your poll, and scale according to turnout predictions. The final result amounts to an educated guess backed partly by statistics.
It will be interesting to see if they still exist. Or for that matter if they ever existed. At no time, did I hear diebold state that they had a log file available on each machine that record the info.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'm not even so concerned with overturning a bush presidency (although I will admit that from my point of view that would be sweet)
Id just like to see america understand the nature of these machines... that they are not safe and reliable... that there are security holes and that there is no accountability in the long run.
thats all really...
they don't even have to find evidence of intentional fraud... hell they could even find that 100,000 kerry votes were invalid for all I care as long as it leads to an accountable voting system in the future.
but I don't hold out too much hope of that happening.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Take a look at Miami-Dade ... IIRC, they are using touch-screens there.
... though Diebold made sure to design their equipment to be impossible to audit, a deliberate design decision in stark contrast to the ATMs they manufacture as their core business.
... again, as a deliberate design decision, in contrast with other banking equipment Diebold manufactures.
... abdicating fully their position as our democracies watchdog and a check and balance on the government.
Miami-Dade was supposed to be incredibly Democratic and they only got a 54-46 margin.
Very suspect.
I agree with your conclusion, but not with your reason.
The Diebold touchscreens are a bit of a red herring. Yes, they are a concern and should be audited (and auditable)
The Diebold tabulators are the real concern. Like the touchscreen machines, they produce no paper trail and are difficult or impossible to audit
The tabulators are the big computers that collect millions of votes and tallies them up. They are used to count votes from touch screens, as well as from other precincts using everything from op-scan sheets to punch cards. A two digit back door code will let you change voting totals, with absolutely no evidence that you've done so.
In every other country, when exit polls differ significantly from the official results, it is generally considered a pretty strong indicator of voter fraud. In the United States, CNN simply changes their polling data to match the official result
I have no idea if the elections in Ohio and Florida were rigged, or if Bush won legitimately. I truly hope it is the latter. I don't expect the US to emerge from four more years with much intact in the way of its economy and influence in the world, much less with many of the social gains of the last quarter century still intact, but it would be far worse for America if Bush stole this election than if he won it legitimately.
The problem is, with machines that are designed to be impossible to audit, and with tabulators that have a software feature designed to facilitate fraud, we can't know.
Ever.
And that is terribly disturbing.
To any critically thinking mind, the legitimacy of this entire election is serious doubt, and would have been irrespective of who won. Using unauditable equipment in an election undermines the entire process at its most fundamental level, and does more to destabilize the political climate in America than a thousand bin Ladens could possibly ever achieve.
Diebold and others who produce similarly shoddy election equipment need to be put out of business, immediately and perminently.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Wow, the Badnarik supporters are that upset about losing are they?
I for one welcome our newly re-elected ape overlord
Same thing here. Find and fix the problems now, when the race has been conceded, and the result isn't in doubt, so that, when we need to be able to count on the system to count every vote, we can.
Like I said, the only place in Iowa that I heard that they were doing was Des Moines - and Des Moines is not representative of the whole state.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
It just accurately represents the fully aggregated results of ALL exit polling. No one will answer this question: What, exactly, are you alleging? People keep saying "revised" or "modified". Please answer this for me, so I understand you clearly: Are you suggesting that CNN and/or other organizations have falsified exit poll data or otherwise provided incorrect, artificiual, or manufactured exit poll numbers such that it "matches" the election results? Yes or no. If yes, what POSSIBLE motivation would CNN have to falsify exit polls, ESPECIALLY in the state on which the entire election hinged? Why would the Kerry campaign, a $300M, two year operation do absolutely nothing about it?
Forget the whining Democrats who apparently can't campaign themselves out of a wet paper bag. Forget that Diebold's CEO is apparently an idiot. The point is, This is not a partisan issue, friends, its called basic Democracy. If we as a country can't trust our elections, there will eventually be serious, destabilizng consequences. - Very bad for business.
Why can't people just accept that they lost and move on? No, they're going to waste tons of money and resources. Why don't you start trying to figure out how you can position Hillary to win in 2008?
Bev Harris and BlackboxVoting are certainly doing great work in exposing fraud and corruption among DRE voting machine makers (and other types, for that matter).
But the real solution to the problem, long term, past the current election, is to get electronic voting machines based on open source code, and that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. It just so happens that there's an organization for that purpose that could really use some assistance (financial and otherwise) right now: the Open Voting Consortium.
Just to be extra-sexy, our reference system uses Linux and Python :-).
BTW. Some readers will think: "What's wrong with plain old paper and pencil?" Actually, there's not so much wrong with that. I just used a pencil to vote in Massachusetts yesterday, and it worked great. Paper ballot. Zero line at the polls. Perfectly transparent. Great security (just look at that padlock on the ballot box).
But electronic machines do have a few good things, as long as their source code is open and the print out paper ballots after selections are made: Multi-lingual; blind accessible (using audio interface) and special interfaces for motor-impaired voters; large fonts for vision impaired voters; prevent overvotes and unintentional undervotes.
Buy Text Processing in Python
. . . if they would be doing this if Kerry had won. If so, then what they're doing is a laudible effort to vet the federal election system, point out where it can be improved, and help restore people's confidence in it.
If not, then it's nothing more than a petty attempt to make as many people (the folks that have to gather all the data for these requests. Remember them?) as possible just as miserable as possible for nothing more than a meaningless act of political revenge.
I voted for Senator Kerry, and I suspect I know how someone like him would react to something like this, supposedly done in his name.
Regards;
"Networks called the election before anyone bothered to perform even the most rudimentary audit."
So what? The networks are not an official part of the election process. They can say anything they want, it is not legally binding in any way. Until each state certifies it's results (over the next few weeks), there are NO official results.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Here's the thing -- for the first time, it's possible that a single, clever hacker slightly altered the returns across the state of Florida to convincingly shift the outcome by a percent or two. I agree with you that most likely it didn't happen -- but damn, there's just no way of knowing, is there? The statement "there is not wholesale or widespread fraud in the election" is one that not you, nor anyone else can support right now. The only way to do that is to sniff around, check all the logs and records and whatever, and see if anything interesting pops up.
A better way to phrase it would be, "we'll never know if there was wholesale or widespread fraud in the election, but since it looks like he won, and it's certainly credible that he did, why don't we just go with it?"
That sentiment makes a lot of sense -- but I'm still glad they're checking into it as best they can.
So... we all do seem to realise that this initiative lacks immediate means to process & analyse large volumes of data involved in this audit. My suggestion is...
:)
Search for Election Voting Fraud @ home !
...following in the footsteps of SETI@Home, this network will enable rapid analysis of voting records through distributed computing. So, who's gonna write the app?
'...computers in the future may have only 1000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons...' Popular Mechanics, 03/49'
And if you argue that one should only enforce your beliefs on oneself, you're forgetting that the Bible has a line saying that allowing your fellow man to proceed to damnation by doing nothing or saying nothing condemns you as well. To me, speaking one's mind in a rational and non-accusational manner is sufficient, but there are those who believe that one must act by enforcing laws on morality, even on issues which do not effect them directly.
You may claim that the base assumptions are irrational. However, I don't think there's a way to prove it either way.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
I sure do hope it proves elections were rigged
And why do you hope this? Is it that you don't like the results? Or do you believe that the election was rigged and want it to be proven? And by the way. The Audit can still be a success if it proves the election wasn't rigged, if there was no fraud. So don't autmatically claim that the audit has failed if they didn't find and fraud. Cause there probably isn't any.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
*shrug* How different is that from the current state of affairs? All that a church wedding does is get you wedded in the eyes of the Church. Heck, a few systems don't even require a wedding to be married. Even the Catholic system only requires the two people getting married and one witness. The actual secular Church involvement is largely bookkeeping, recording the marriage and ensuring that it's legit (no bigamy, close blood relationship, shotgun wedding...). You can be wedded in the name of whatever church you choose, and as many times as you choose, but until you get your marriage certificate signed by city hall, you're not married in the eyes of the State. I'm cool with that. The religious ceremony involves spiritual bindings and the legal ceremony involves legal bindings. Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Give unto God what is God's.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Well, from the poster in his book. The poster portrays Bush and Kerry as a boxing match. A banner reads, "Every citizen guaranteed a vote.*" The footnote reads "* Vote not guaranteed to count."
except you just take votes, only a handful out of every thousand. Kinda like in Office Space (or Superman 3). obviously, too much one way would be suspicious.
Is this being paranoid? maybe, but Diebold doesn't exactly inspire trust. they could stop all complaints by opening up their machines for independent review & allowing a paper trail (without which their can be no real recounts).
Interesting analysis at Rense.com for all you conspiracy theorists.
Nice going. There have been about a dozen posts from Republicans who want to kill any investigation of the machines by claiming that only "Democrat wackos" will "crawl out of the woodwork". I was relieved to see that the Democrats were in fact pretty reasonable, with only one stupid comment (claiming that any error would require the whole election to be re-run).
Unless you are also a Republican trying to sabotage this investigation with a fake post, you have damaged your own cause.
Face it. Kerry lost, despite my and your vote for him. He lost by a large enough margin that there is no plausable way that any error by the Diebold machines in Ohio could have changed his loss (it would require those precients to be magically 70/30 for Kerry while all others in Ohio appear to be 51/49 for Bush).
The first thing for everybody to do it admit NOW that challenging these machines is NOT challenging the election and drown out all the rabid Republicans who are trying as we speak to stop any attempts to get rid of these illegal machines by making claims that the challenge is from sore-loser Democrats and should be ignored.
Is it (or should it be) reflexive?
Diebold and friends have in all likelihood stolen the most important election of our lifetime. We never know for certain, because the real results of the election may have deleted forever, with a few presses of a backspace key.
Others have already said the obvious: the exit polls don't match up to the Diebold tabulations. The record number of new voters all casting ballots for an embattled incumbent seems incredibly unlikely. In my mind, this portents a new era in American politics: the most cunning cheater always wins. And with the Republicans gaining more and more ground thanks to Diebold and other dirty tricks, they'll be the ones in the best position to cheat.
We can be certain that the Republican's new electronic apparatus will entrench itself further and grow in sophistication--unless it is stopped right now. Diebold will be emboldened by this victory, and the people Diebold put in power won't lift a finger to stop it. In few short years, even the Supreme Court will probably be stacked with men who essentially owe their jobs to Diebold.
The media is filled with cowards will we now shift to the right in response to the wind. If the Diebold story doesn't make huge headlines now, then it never will.
What difference does it make it you can get record number of people to the polls if an evil nazi-nerd can push a button and erase all those votes?
Reform of the election process should become everyone's #1 issue. Protests of epic proportions are needed, because as of right now, all the suffrage gained since the dawn of the Union is in peril.
Right now, no one aside from Diebold has the right to vote. Not even the white landowners.
www.georgewbush.com
www.georgebush.com
Are == no longer == accesible from outside of the United States.
Another very happy news are looming out
just few hours after the election.
According to Reuters U.S. strategic military petroleum reserves are being filled causing mayor drain in normal oil flow (and driving price of oil sky high) inspite the fact that every driller is sucking crude like crazy, Reuters is predicting that "commander in chief" will be pretty agressive in the middle east soon.
It is refresing to see some realistic responses from at least some Republicans and Democrats.
I voted for Kerry. HE LOST! And I know it.
I serioulsly distrust these machines because I have rudimentary knowledge of how computers work and are designed and programmed. Not because I think Kerry could have won, or that I want the election challenged, or because I am a terrorist bent on starting a civil war, or because I am a "bitter sore loser".
Unfortunately too many people are trying to squash any investigation of these machines by saying it is "sore loser Democrats who don't know when to give up" doing it. And it does not help that there are a some Democrats who are acting exactly this way. Reading some of the responses to this article, I count at least 25 (browing at +2) where Republicans are basically saying "this is sore-losers and conspiracy theorists" and 8 actual rabid Democrats saying "it was a conspiracy and the election should be challenged". Counter this with about maybe 1 Democrat agreeing with me (not counting responses) and your post which is the first Republican one that questions the machines. This is not good, the loud and illogical extremists on both sides are going to kill any support for real investigation of these machines, which incidentally can be fixed just as easily by a Democrat to deliver a Democrat victory as by a Republican. Maybe even easier, if Slashdot is any indication the people with the necessary knowledge to work for these companies and sneak in code seems to slant pretty far left!
I am hoping that there can be bi-partisan support of people who all agree "Kerry lost the election but that does not mean these machines work". Any idea how to get sensible claims out above all the noise?
How many people would be for this if it was the other way around? Lets say it looks like Kerry actually won the election, and something like this happens and could mean that he has the chance of losing.
Or what if it turns out that Democrats had these machines rigged for Kerry, what would you think of that?
You wouldn't deposit money in the bank without getting a recipt, so why skip a recipt when voting for the leaders of the world's leading nuclear super-power ?!?!
The fix is in, touch screens that record 'blank votes', MS Access can edit the voting data files, voting code available on FTP sites...
blackboxvoting.org is right on the money (literally). A paper system can not be defrauded as simply as a computer system.
I recommend replacing the black box voting with a paper system. The paper system should provide you with a carbon copy of the votes you placed, and a filing copy of the votes you turn in. Simple enough.
The IRS insists on paper records, why not our democracy?
Seems to me we could fairly easily do a pretty good job of verifying the vote. Here's how we'd handle a single vote for a single community of voters (whether a precinct or the whole country):
Here are some consequences:
There are a few problems with this; for one thing I don't know if whether a given person has voted is supposed to be public information; for another it would be hard to look for illegal voters. But I think this is a big improvement over the black box we have now!
Dude, you call yourself the "digitalsamurai". You are definately a cretin AND moron, as well as being a FACIST!
Your question is an extremely valid one. The issue is that according to our Constitution, the voting process is governed not by the federal government, but by the states. And the states often farm out decisions on equipment and small decisions to counties and towns. The only way to have a unified voting system with one set of equipment, rules and staff would be to amend the Constitution to give the federal government control over the election process.
This is an amendment that I would support, but changing the Constitution is a difficult process and I wouldn't hold my breath on it coming through any day soon.
But yeah, basically, it happens the way it does because it's illegal for it to happen any other way.
--
RumorsDaily
Good riddens, and have a *good* time in what ever country you go to. It isn't like they will have any rules or govenment officials that you will hate.
Giving the voter proof of who they voted for defeats the purpose of secret ballots: you can coerce somebody to vote in a certain way and to present you with the proof that they did. It generally is public information whether or not a person voted in a given election. They check you off in a great big book, and if you're a politician and haven't voted, they hassle you for it.
Thank you for generalizing the opinion of anyone who claims to be a democrat by assuming that everyone feels like the parent does.
A more appropriate response would be 'Hold. You don't want felons to vote, but not to write the voting software?' Unfortunately, you have no evidence that the parent is a democrat, nor that they want felons to vote.
It makes your comment rash, dumb, and ignorant. Thank you for playing the fallacious argument game, come again.
Yeah, like sending all those personnel to Iraq.
Which is worse than outing a critic's spouse as a CIA agent how?
Lying to pollsters would seem especially likely if one of the candidates has publicly declared that if you're not with him, you're with the terrorists. It's even more likely if that candidate's people have a record of hauling people off to camps for years without access to lawyers or trials.
I wasn't accosted by any exit pollster, but if I had been, I'd have been quite tempted to say that I'd voted for the non-terrorist candidate. After all, I don't really know who the supposed pollster is reporting to, or whether they might recognize me.
I'd think that any sensible person might be nervous about admitting to a stranger to being "with the terrorists", as our president would describe us.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Did anyone else see the blurb yesterday about the voting machines in Ohio that had votes in them before the polls opened?
And want the aluminum hats off? The post you cite is from Diebold, so just how trustworthy is it? An independent source would be more appropriate. Also, the fact that the Diebold CEO is pro-Bush is troublesome at least. There is no objective reason to suspect him of anything worse than bad judgement in public statments, but ... for the tin foil hat crowd, it couldn't look much worse now, could it.
Your argument for open source code is good, but the custodian idea is problematic. How would you insure non-partisanship in the custodian?
In the mean time we appear to be stuck with the sock puppet for another four years.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
I'm thinking of starting an open source project that does just this. Thinking of going the cheap route and doing it in linux. Unfortunatly I don't really know linux, so I have to put the system together with Visual Basic and VC++ and ask some open sourcers to port it.
Anyway, I see it printing out two copies of the ballot. One copy is kept by the voter, the other is given to the pollworker. The ballot is also xfered to an electronic 'ballot box' (aka local server)
When the polling place closes, the signed and PGPed electronic votes are sent to the master tabulator and the paper ballots are stored under lock and key.
In the event the electronic results are challanged, the paper ballots can be used.
In the event the paper ballots go missing, voters can be contacted usually by mail to send in a photocopy of their ballot.
All paper ballots will have a text version of the votes as well as a Code 39 barcode version with the text printed underneith.
The polling place will have a dedicated barcode scanner that can be used to make sure the barcode matches the text.
Keep in mind though that the code 39 font I will made for this system will include the symbol's letter undernieth the symbol. This is built into the font, not the program.
Any comment's suggestions?
This is totally doable in Visual Basic, but I have security concerns with windows.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
I find it amazing that a state like Mississippi which voted to ban gay marriage by huge majority still had a comparably close race for president. So it must be something else.
It's not inconsistent at all.
There are a number of issues that might be important to a voter. Potential voters are not a unified mass with identical opinions, or a collection of a small number of such masses of clones. Instead, each individual has a distinct opinion, and a distinct importance weighting, on each issue.
Once people have come out to vote, they will vote their opinion, not just on the issue that decided their presidential choice, but on every issue on which they have a preference, regardless of how strong the preference or how much importance they hang on the issue.
For a (possibly small) fraction of the voters the gay marriage thing is a very important issue. For some it would make the election important enough to go vote even if they otherwise would have skipped it. For others (probably far more) it would swing their vote to a candidate they would have opposed if the issue had not been in play and they'd decided on the next most important issue.
But there are a lot of people for whom their presidential choice was made on other issues - War, Economy, Taxes, Health Care, Education, Anti-terrorism, anti-anti-terrorism-side-effects, etc. - who also have an opinion on gay marriage. A lot of such people might have voted for Kerry for president but against gay marriage.
There aren't two sides to an issue. At the US federal level there are hundreds of millions to each of many issues. There may be a LOT of clustering. But to assume the voters are identical clones of a handfull of stereotypes is to make the same mistake as the Media make when they say, for instance, that ALL Boomers are drug-swilling hedonists and ALL gen-Xers are Punks in business suits, that ALL blacks are gangsters, and so on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I liked the polls where i live, great big poster sized interface that has a bunch of buttons with lights, they blow up the election poll to poster sized put plastic over it and put it over the inteface such that the options line up with the buttons, you push the candidates name an arrow lights up next to it, you want to change your vote press his name again, arrow disappears and you push your new choice. Worked great and was fast and easy to use.
He did that in a 2003 fundraising letter in his capacity as private citizen, not as the head of Diebold. He also realized his mistake, and banned Diebold election employees (including himself) from all political activities except voting.
How stupid would he have to be to try to rig the election, when everyone in the world is watching, when getting caught means jail time and the loss of his reputation and the loss of the Presidency for his party for at least four years and probably more? He'd have to be stupid and insane.
That's one reason why the exit polls were not supposed to be published. They aren't statistically valid, since people in one time period may tend to vote all one way. For instance, I understand that women tend to vote early in the day, while men tend to do vote later. Urban areas are easier to exit poll, and that may have been who was reported.
The process was designed to be difficult to verify, so WHY should it be trusted?
It should be trusted because thousands of grandmothers are watching it. It should be trusted because it's all we've got. We must be diligent and make sure it doesn't get corrupted, but there's no need to assume it's a sham without any evidence.
sigs, as if you care.
This also works the same way with the pro-death...er pro-choice supporters
They simply pretend that instead of killing innocent human beings, they are killing sub-human blobs.
The first prerequisite of abortion is that the aggressors collectively refuse to acknowledge that the victims are human. Once the masses have been converted, they simply ignore any argument that appeals to human rights.
The difference is, in war and such, you're generally killing for retaliation against one who had done you wrong (and prevention of future problems) instead of an innocent.
That could give a whole new shade of meaning to "War Dialing".
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So why does some hat either steal or pay some miscreants some cash to steal a diebold voting machine? Then one could perform at their leisure a true audit.
That's a good name--ground! I wonder if it will be friends with me?
I think the networks had an interest in making the election look closer than it was (and by extension Zorgby, too) Perhaps more people stayed up, like you did, to watch the results precisely because of the reported closeness of the race. As far as tinfoil hats- just because one paranoid, it doesn't mean somebody isn't out to get you- The deception may be more subtle, and from a different source, but I wouldn't let the press off scott-free
ATDT 12020031337 ...
o me>logout
CARRIER 384000
login: asbesto
password: *******
Welcome to the 2004 Elections Vote Aggregator asbesto
It is now 22:16PM EST.
Your fortune cookie for today is.. "Those who would give up their liberty to obtain security deserve neither"
~home> sql electionDB
sql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM VOTES
105,283,223 rows selected.
sql> SELECT COUNT(*) FROM VOTES WHERE Voter_YearOfBirth UPDATE VOTES SET PRESIDENTIALVOTE='BUSH' WHERE Voter_YearOfBirth SELECT COUNT(*) FROM VOTES WHERE PRESIDENTIALVOTE='BUSH'
66,666,666
sql>quit
~h
Would they be able to see how I voted if they got their hands on this information?
I get receipts from the gas pump, the ATM, and self serve checkouts. Why in the world can't an electronic voting machine produce 2 pieces of paper: one for me and one as a record for audit purposes? If nothing else, it seems Diebold is missing a revenue opportunity here. Make this an add on deluxe feature or something. There's a huge install base of these machines right now. If they don't do it someone else will.
We need to determine whether or not vote-rigging or ballot-stuffing has occurred, and obtain conditions for future elections so that election-rigging is not possible in the future.
I suspect that the only way to make that determination will be to obtain the design information (source code, memos, diagrams, schematic drawings, etc.) for the election machinery, and open them to expert examination. I suspect we could easily find a few hundred PhD's who would be willing to examine the designs. So what is needed is to get the machinery and the design information into a forum where it can be examined.
I'm not sure how that can be done. Perhaps, a suit could be filed alledging election-rigging. Then, the discovery process could be used to obtain the evidence.
I'm thinking of starting an open source project that does just this. Thinking of going the cheap route and doing it in linux. Unfortunatly I don't really know linux, so I have to put the system together with Visual Basic and VC++ and ask some open sourcers to port it.
You want to write a good and secure program, but don't want to spend time learning how to make it work on a correct OS ??
That's strange. There's nothing difficult with Linux, if you want to make that kind of program you should at least ready to spend that time.
wtf.n0x.org
Electronic voting fraud is more than possible, it's inevitable. Did it occur in this election? Unless a group with a lot of skill can get unlimited access to each sort of machine and acquire the source code used in the machines for this election (not the old Diebold source that was leaked), we will probably never know.
As for fraud, it wouldn't have to be a conspiracy at all. A conspiracy means a group of more than one. Yet in a case like this, a single coder with access to the voting machines, say, someone working for Diebold, could throw an entire national election.
If the code were self modifying and obfuscated it could be very difficult to detect. Especially as the Diebold code used in this election has never been publicly scrutinized and may never be. And as the system is running Windows, it will have nearly endless areas in which an illicit bit of code could be inserted.
This single hacker could write a very small bit of code with any number of tests and checks to insure it only ran during an actual election. It could also have tests to insure it only skewed votes in districts with little oversight. I've only given it a moment's thought, but I've come up with a few good tests, I'm sure a bit of thought and intimate knowledge of voting procedures could devise even better ones.
Most obviously, these systems certainly have clocks, so the illicit code could wait until November 2nd. Then it could check for very complex schedules of events that only occur during an actual election. For example, the machine being turned on for many hours, yet only being asked to record a vote once a minute or less, on average.
A simple test like that could get past most quality assurance testing efforts. Most tests would fail to activate the hidden application because QA testers usually run through a testing process much faster than actual users (voters) use the machines. The hidden application could combine those tests with a bunch of other tests.
The illicit code could be designed to only skew the voting when the votes for a certain candidate (Bush) were overwhelming. Meaning it would never skew results in the districts strongly the other way, or districts with close finishes. So the districts with most of the monitoring would never have their votes altered.
But in each strongly republican district, this sort of check would change the tally to give Bush just a slightly larger percentage of votes than were actually cast.. I suspect few people would give a moment's thought to Bush winning a strongly republican district by 65% instead of 60%.
Yet skewing results exclusively in strongly republican districts could shift state-wide election totals by a percentage point or more. A close election such as those seen in any number of states this year could be stolen by just such an effort.
The system could have further checks to insure it was never activated when being tested or monitored. It could wait to skew results until it was uploading data back to the source. That source machine could have an otherwise innocuous vendor setting that the illicit application would recognize as the trigger to skew results.
Such a system could even potentially print extra paper receipts to cover its tracks in the case of a cursory audit. But that would probably not even be necessary. Because recounts cost candidates a lot of money. And I can't imagine a democratic candidate paying for a recount in an uncontested, heavily republican district.
This is not some nightmare scenario, if it hasn't happened yet, it is bound to happen sometime. Only by returning to some sort of user fulfilled ballot can we prevent a single hacker from fixing a national election.
Of course Bush won, that's what the computers were programmed to do! And we all know computers can only do what they're programmed to. So, Congratulations! Once everything is Finalized, the man calling himself "President" will really only be a dictator put into power in an utterly digusting and back-handed manner. Though there was no loss of life, and everyone will believe he really is President. Sooo, everything is fine, please return to your life and forget this ever happened.
The problem is that giving receipts to the voter allows vote-buying, and even extortion of voters by companies/employers/etc. Historically, in some districts, each voter was given two tokens (one for each candidate). He put one in the box (as the vote for that candidate), and kept the other. The plantation-owner would just insist on receiving the other token (the one for the candidate that the plantation-owner opposed) as a condition of continued employment.
this was my second presidential election, and a similar process was used in this one and in 2000. My generation is growing up so used to computers that they don't even question this sort of thing!
Here we are, bickering about if there's any fraud in the election, while I'm sitting here wondering "what if there was a single event upset (SEU) in the memory of the damn machines, which resulted in a MSB flip for Bush from 0 to 1?" With semiconductors getting smaller and smaller, radiation plays a bigger role, and since we are talking about conspiracy theory and remote possibilities, here's another one to kick around...
The reason voters haven't been given proof of who they voted for is abuses that become possible given such proof -- from pay-per-vote to vote-as-boss-says-or-don't-come-back-to-work.
Okay, what's the ratio of people who voted in the exit poll to people who voted total?
Are certain people more likely to choose to take an exit poll than others?
Were the polls conducted at random throughout the state, or at specific locations?
What do you suppose the margin of error on this kind of essentially unscientific poll are? Maybe it isn't as bad as the slash-dot polls are, but they're probably not all that accurate either.
I your statement that they are "not at all statistically similar" probably isn't as accurate as you think it is.
The encumbent President who
* lost the popular vote in 2000 (winning by a hair on the basis of some very sketchy events)
* started a War on false pretenses (WMDs?)
* sent over 1000 young Americans to their death.
* and many thousands more mamed and disabled.
* not to mention many thousands of dead innocent Iraqis.
* who's Vice President's (prior?) employer received gigantic government contracts on a silver platter.
* Putting the nation into the Largest Debt ever. (20% and 420 billion dollars over budget in 03!)
All the while...
* Millions of Illegal Aliens have flooded into the country --over 12 million now make up the general population.
* the nation's Economy lost more Jobs than it has in over 70 years. Hundreds of thousands!
* average Wages are down.
* the Stock Markets have stagnated.
* Education, Health Care and Energy costs have risen multiple times more than the normal inflation rate.
* and plenty of other nasties.
And now you're telling me that he honestly earned _more_ of the popular vote? Why?
* Because homosexuals want to get married?
* Becasue he gave you a few dollars back on your tax return --and a whole lot of YOUR dollars to _millionares_?
* Becuase scientists want to use unviable fertility clinic embryos (_not_ abortion embryos) in order to try to save lives like Chris Reeves?
* Because he'll protect us better? Funny I think two big buildings were blown up on _his_ watch.
Again, you're telling me this President got _more_ of the popular vote this time around?
In an election where
* _all_ the exit poles are 5-10% "wrong"?
* in which more of the youth voted --voters well known to lean to the left.
* a larger turn out translated into more Republican votes, which has _never_ happened in history.
* thousands of new unverifiable e-voting machines have been used in, guess what, mostly Democratic and Africa American strong holds. Huh, that's odd.
...
If you haven't realized by now that this election has been rigged again, even better than the last time, then you are a dope.
Many republicans (I dare say "most" even) have listened to Limbaugh over the years, especially during presidential races. I used to listen in the 90's.
During election times, he would repeatedly suggest to his listeners that they should LIE to the exit pollers, if polled.
This is for the sole purpose of making the media look bad. Given the millions of people that have listened (or still do) to his show, it's no surprise that the exit polls would be off a few percent, artificially in favor of Kerry.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
This is possibly the worst moderation I have ever read on Slashdot. There's nothing even the least bit insightful about this.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
But consider this....suppose they start an investigation of the voting process, and it is discovered that Kerry was just as fraudulant as Bush? Both candidates disqualified! Nader is the new president! Kerry wouldn't feel much better then, would he?
Qxe4
"I'm not even so concerned with overturning a bush presidency (although I will admit that from my point of view that would be sweet)"
And also very unlikely. It would be more likely that the Ohio electors would be disqualified completely, which would throw the election to the House (and Senate for VP). Bush wins (unless they also get enough House members disqualified to give a majority to the Dems; unlikely at the moment, since that would take something like 30 house seats).
Do NOT use Code 39. Or, if you do, use one of the variants that has a check digit or two.
We use Code39 here at work for some barcoding, and scanning errors happen all the time. Code128 is much more reliable, and leads to faster processing (in fact, some processes now require double scanning of some barcodes, to ensure that the scan is correct.)
We are the Music Makers, and We are the Dreamers of Dreams...
Geez... Don't forget Gluttony!
The tax break for Hummer/Navigator buyers, the refusal to really push for efficiency has got to qualify as Gluttony.
It now appears CNN changed their exit poll numbers when it looked like they didn't match the vote counts. It also seems interesting that FL and OH were the states with the exit poll discrepancies... and they use the Diebold "blackbox" voting machines, the ones where vote totals can be changed without leaving a trace.
Unlimited growth == Cancer.
I think your tinfoil hat may be just a shade too tight...
"My life's work has been to prompt others... and be forgotten." --Cyrano de Bergerac
They generally try to exit poll in multiple precincts with a representative sample of the state. According to here, CNN only got 28% of their exit poll data from Central Iowa (probably mostly Des Moines).
Okay, I totally agree with you and I'm definitely not telling that anyone rigged this election (and I'm not even american, so I could care less), but here is the question that I can't keep asking myself:
With systems such as the Diebold machines, HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO CHECK IF THERE WAS, OR WASN'T, A FRAUD?
Look, I can think of many, many ways to scam that kind of system. Just add 50 votes for one of the candidates in each diebold machines (more than 46 000 used in this election) and you've just added 2,300,000 votes to that candidate.
These votes could be added prior to the election (database starts with 50 votes built-in), added randomly during the election process, or manually added later (it's a fsking Microsoft Access database), or when the machine "phones home" to send the results.
This is double-edged: on one hand, nobody will ever be able to prove that there was a fraud. But on the other hand, nobody will ever be able to prove that there was NO fraud either. How are you supposed to get a recount? The database will give you the same result over and over again... What's best is, all the counties who bought Diebold machines signed a deal with Diebold stating that in case of a recount, the county officials won't be able to even touch the machine, and Diebold staff will be responsible for "recounting"
So get ready for 20+ years of consipracy theories claiming that bush stole the election: nobody will EVER be able to prove the tinfoil-hat-and-not-so-tinfoil-hats theories wrong. It's funny when it's about Roswell and the moon landings; much less when it's about the American presidential election.
Hello! I'm a disaster waiting to happen!
From the standpoint of verifying the correctness of this election, it's only worthwhile to audit a few of the closest states
True, but...
I haven't seen the list of counties chosen for the audit but you can assume that the number they have taken can statistically be close to what happened to all other machines. If for example 25% of X type of voting machines made errors in their audit, you can assume that 25% of the people who voted on such a machine did not get their vote taken into account as it was supposed to.
Now what will people say if such a number of votes are wrong? Would anybody, whoever he voted for, be pleased to know his vote had 1/4 of a chance to be for the other side in a democracy?
Like I said, Des Moines is the only place I heard about. I'd be interested to see where else they polled at. They claimed 48% from eastern Iowa (our population center). If you look at this map http://www.usatoday.com/news/politicselections/vot e2004/countymap.htm you'll see that they got 76% of the states polls from the "blue" counties and 24% from the "red" counties.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
It's not a conspiracy. Liberals are just more full of hot air. I didn't participate in any exit polls because I don't want people to know how I voted.
I mean look at all the faggots that we hear about all the time. 11 states shut them down because no one wants to take it up the butt.
So I hope all the gays move to Canada or Mexico or where ever they can find the immoral freedom they're looking for because the U.S.A. thinks they're dumb and should shut their loud mouths.
Is there an open source voting software alternative to Diebold? A quick search at sourceforge doesn't show anything of national election quality. Is there an open source project for real voting? I'm still a student, but would donate time towards simpler coding tasks for such a project. Hell, these machines are owned by the gov't now, so they can install whatever software they like, right? I have read (prob'ly also at blackbox) that the Diebold crap runs WinXP and keeps records in Access!!!! Can't be that hard to beat. I mean, it only has to do ONE THING. This could be designed from the ground up with fair confidence of zero weaknesses, except for physical, which is where ya bring in an EE! We the people could do this!!!
I find it hard to believe only 3,000 requests is the largest. I've known people to make more then 10,000 at a time.
I lie about it just about everyday here in California just so I don't have to here another Moore-ish speech from some self-important political know-it-all. Its almost become reflex. If you jump in someone's face enough about their choices, it doesn't make them change their choice, they just change enough to get you out of their face. There are plenty of reasons to lie, some as innocent as convenience.
I remember looking at the TV images on the night of September 11, and saying "I hope this doesn't mean the end of democracy in America". (What's left of it, that is). Now, I feel prescient. This election is the last nail in the coffin of democracy.
The use of absolutely unauditable machines is unconscionable. I expected the Bushites to steal this election, just like last time, only more effectively. Now they have.
I am convinced that this election has been stolen. I do not accept Bush as a legitimate president. I never will. And those who support the use of these untraceable machines are supporting the antithesis of democracy.
Welcome to the USA, prime banana republic.
I guess the election commissions are bound to deliver this data if they can. But how long will it take? What good will it be to know that Bush actually lost if we don't find out until 2007? I guess it would help ensure 2008 is fairer (if Bush hasn't been proclaimed President for Life by then :-(
SoCalDem has done a statistical analysis... ...on several swing states, and EVERY STATE that has EVoting but no paper trails has an unexplained advantage for Bush of around +5% when comparing exit polls to actual results.
In EVERY STATE that has paper audit trails on their EVoting, the exit poll results match the actual results reported within the margin of error.
So, we have MATCHING RESULTS for exit polls vs. voting with audits
vs.
A 5% unexplained advantage for Bush without audits.
For full report , see link
http://www.rense.com/general59/steI.HTM/
I think that "puritanical Christian right-wing" is a big fat sterotype. Do you categorize people as niggers, spics, and waps too? Grow up.
With literally billions in contracts given away to companies (like Haliburton) without any bidding after the last 'election', and billions more available now, not thinking that the companies making voting equipment 'might' skew the outcome to get a piece of this pie is naïve. Are you paranoid if they really are out to get you?
Guess what? I hate to break the news to you, but as naive as you girlie-men want to be, we're in a WAR with people who will not simply go away and leave us alone. Keep ignoring them like Clinton did when they blew up the embassies and the Oklahoma City federal building, when the first World Trade Center bombing happened, when they blew up TWA Flight 800, etc. Clinton could have had that fucknut Osama handed over to him on a silver platter, but he didn't have the balls that Bush has, so 3000 people had to die on 9/11.
Oh, how about "No blood for oil" and all this anti-Iraq-war bullshit? Look on a map. Look carefully. Iraq is right smack in the middle of the worst trouble-making region for terrorism. Having such a huge U.S. military installation there is an INGENIOUS strategy. But you sore losers fail to see it because it's more important to have a democrat in the White House than to keep our country and the world secure.
I was a democrat my whole life. When 9/11 happened, I said, "Thank God we have Bush." And today, I say, "Thank God that Bush won the election."
Speaking as a board member for Blackboxvoting.org:
This is indeed going to be a hell of a lot of data, but our resources are considerable.
We were going to do this no matter WHO won. Because it's not just about the top of the ticket: more money gets tied up in local bond measures, construction projects and the like than in the "top of ticket campaigns" in many states. Check out how much money went into the California propositions, for starters.
It's also not just about the races themselves: folks, there are legal standards for the use of electronic voting machines at both the Fed and State levels. The garbage put out by Deibold for sure and probably ES&S, Sequoia and others DO NOT meet those legal standards!
But we have to prove it. For that, we need data.
We've gotten one KEY piece already: proof that King County hacked into their audit log and destroyed three hours worth of records on election night during the WA state primaries.
The fact that they COULD (on a Diebold box) proves that the gear doesn't meet legal security standards. The remaining question is "why did they hack the log?". Two possible answers:
1) It's possible the vote tally box went massively wonky, it took 'em three hours to clean up, and they didn't want to admit it had puked so they edited the log. Still an illegal-as-hell destruction of records and the fact that it's even possible is a gross condemnation of the gear in question...
2) They actually rigged the race with some crude clueless technique that left an audit trail item - so they scrubbed the log.
------
Speaking generally, this sort of "broad net" approach to FOIAs that BBV.org is undertaking is a pain, but it's how you scoop up killer documents that blow the lid off. Go watch the mostly factual movie "Erin Brokavich" for a real-world example of this.
We have a new advantage in California - Prop59 just "supercharged" our version of the FOIA (California Public Records Act) by establishing a constitutional right to public records. That will have a positive effect on the California requests.
--------
Speaking personally, I'm pretty sure Bush won it fair overall. If I'm eventually proven wrong, I don't think it'll be in Ohio, it'll be in Florida.
Full disclosure: I'm a Libertarian-leaning Republican who supported Bush over Kerry despite reservations. But I'm also a flat-out enemy of concealed-source, zero-paper-trail voting systems.
Jim March
Otherwise, what's to stop a hacker from "doubling up" multiple voters onto a single index? You'd have to pair votes with a hash whose source included voter-specific information (full name and exact time of vote would probably be sufficient) along with a random number long enough to prevent anyone malicious from brute forcing it to find out who you voted for.
Any voter can verify that his vote was counted by looking it up with his index, and can prove his vote to a third party by using the signed copy
One word: cameraphone. It's no longer very expensive or obtrusive to take a short video of yourself casting your vote. Blackmailing or bribing someone into recording their vote isn't as obvious (or as cheap) a hole as getting them to reveal their receipt and key, but it's already there.
Compare the number of respondents between the two screenshots. Number one has 1963, number two has 2020, a difference of only 57 people. Yet somehow Kerry's percentage for all categories that can be seen dropped at least 3 percent, one of them by 5 percent. 3 percent is possible if EVERY SINGLE ONE of the 57 extra people said they voted for Bush, but we all know the chances of this are basically zero. And that still doesnt explain the 5 percent difference for the first figure listed (males).
Joseph?
You like the ballots in Boulder because you arn't making them countable by the "computer". Boulder system is absolutly terrible, but the boulder clerk keeps the horrible systems because it's easy to throw elections.
You see, the "new" boulder system with the big squares means that the ballots have to be sorted in the right order, which means that 100's of paid flesh CPU's have to sort them or the computer won't count them. So perhaps your precint was bored and they sorted them by color... Bingo, your vote DIDN'T GET COUNTED.
But between the polling place and the canvas board, your ballot will be transported in an unsecured steel box. After the 2 party canvas board gets it, then it will go by lockbox to the annex for counting. Most years, the clerk throws out the election officials of any opposing parties, citing "not enough room".
The real reason that they keep a paper ballot system, with central counting, is that they have a stack of "suitable" ballots they can add to "fill in" precints that are not "performing" to expectations. Try to run against the grain in Boulder for ANY office. You will never win. That is also why boulders results come out so late - In races where they can pad enough ballots to get the results right (like state senate or house CD 2) they will watch the rest of the state returns come in, and then "augment" boulders results as necessary.
Try it. Go down and try to get your ballot. Or ask for the spare absentee ballots. Or the leftover ballots from the duplication boards. All typically available from FIA. You won't get them. And the clerk will get nasty.
You mean the tally box registered a bunch of votes for Al Gore?
Article over 1 year old, merely restating what's been mentioned a million times before in this thread, that Diabold is owned by a republican, and this same republican has been donating to Bush. No fraud involved (However much I agree it's in bad taste)
Please at list read the links before you moderate them informative? +5 for this is a joke.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
The machines worked perfectly. The candidate who was supposed to get elected, did.
You want to report an election scandal, John Ashcroft will investigate this right away;
I hear Guantanamo Bay is looking for your type.
Have we ever had:
A president give the order for a terrorist attack on America?
A President lie in the State of the Union Address?
A president leak information about a CIA operative? During a time of War?
A president lie about the invasion of a foreign nation?
A VP who gives a no bid contract to his private company?
A President with a history of DUI?
A convicted felon as the Attorney General?
And we are worried about a swindled election.
OPEN YOUR EYES
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
using the number of posts about slashdot to usenet as evidence. Like Kreskin would, if he were here.
...and blackboxvoting.org were the ones to discover it, back in Late August:
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/?q=node/view/78
Quotations from that article:
"The Diebold GEMS central tabulator contains a stunning security hole":
Submitted by Bev Harris on Thu, 08/26/2004 - 11:43.
Investigations Issue: Manipulation technique found in the Diebold central tabulator -- 1,000 of these systems are in place, and they count up to two million votes at a time.
By entering a 2-digit code in a hidden location, a second set of votes is created. This set of votes can be changed, so that it no longer matches the correct votes. The voting system will then read the totals from the bogus vote set. It takes only seconds to change the votes, and to date not a single location in the U.S. has implemented security measures to fully mitigate the risks.
This program is not "stupidity" or sloppiness. It was designed and tested over a series of a dozen version adjustments."
But I assume you all already knew this...
Just got off the phone with Bev. She confirms that the PRARs started getting mailed *before* we had any clue at all whether Bush or Kerry was winning. Like I said, this was planned months ago (I oughta know, I helped plan it) and it's NOT about "crying foul over specific results".
We're more interested in the machines.
Let's be clear what's going on with this effort:
An "audit", when done properly, means using multiple pieces of information and matching them up to make sure the pieces fit right - and if they don't, figure out why.
We have basically three sources of info on what really happened last night for any given county:
1) Media reports;
2) Eyewitness reports from various election observers;
3) The FOIA (or state-level equivelent) data.
As just one example: media reports say that a Volusia County memory card went blotto last night. Observers saw the flurry of activity that surrounded this. There are also supposed to be "help desk trouble tickets" generated for any such malfunction, and the runaround needed to recreate the data (this was an optical scan Diebold county thank GOD!) should leave an audit trail.
So we'll be looking at this case from ALL angles. Carefully. The media report says it was a dead memory card, based on interviews with county elections officials. OK, no problem if true - with optical scan, you can go back to paper and recover, by hand if necessary.
But remember that in 2000, we *know* somebody attempted an inept hack of one of these same memory cards (PCMCIA). They duplicated a card, probably in a laptop on the way back from the field to county HQ and hacked the duplicate so it registered 16,022 negative votes for Gore and 4,000ish for Bush, in a precinct with 900-something voters tops.
Sure, it got caught and fixed, and somebody let Gore know in time for him to cancel his concession phone call - but the perpetrators were never caught and the county still has egg on it's face from this.
Did the same morons try something similar?
Dunno. But we'll find out. Bet on it.
Jim
I will concede that this may be true. I'm new to the area so I don't know that much about local politics. However, if people with an interest and a desire to change the outcome of an election are allowed unsecured access to the ballots, any election system would be suceptible to ballot box stuffing. (Or discarding of ballots, whatever that's called.) Even electronic voting machines that produce a paper "receipt" would be suceptible to this attack. If the ballots aren't secured, and you can't trust the people running the ballot counting machine, than all bets are off, regardless of what mechanism is used to tabulate the votes. So even if everything you said is true, I still prefer the paper ballots I used yesterday to any other mechanism.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
This is very helpful in showing what Blockboxvoting is working for--not overturning the election, but demonstrating where (or not) there are really problems with the voting systems. It is unlikely that there are problems in sufficient numbers to change the outcome, but if BBV.org is able to gather something like representative samples across the different technologies it will help the arguments on whether electronic voting is a good way to go.
eks
-- Mein Systemadminstrator hat einen großen schwarzen Moustache.
Here's an idea...
Why not create a national voter registry where all votes are uploaded / tabulated and available for review. Votes are tied to a voter id (unique to the individual) and can be reviewed by anyone. This would guarantee that at bare minimum the average joe / jane could verify that his / her vote was at least registered as they intended. It would also lend itself towards removing any chance of fraud or tampering.
I used a paper ballot but I still have no way of knowing for sure if my vote actually counted as the paper ballot is converted into an electronic request using opti-scan technology and presumably transmitted to a central server somewhere to be tallied.
Normally I would be angry at this whole subject and the content coming up on Slashdot as obviously biased tripe, but now I realize how pathetic and sad it is.
Many in this post are suggesting there was malfeasance in the election. Consider for just a moment the affect stealing the election (for someone as weak as Bush?) would have forevermore on the republican party. It would take decades for it to become a semi legitimate party again.
But the people who post to slashdot simply can't accept that their candidate lost. They have to use all of their brain power to discern some conspiracy.
A good republican would say "Great! Let them continue trying to believe these losses aren't because the people don't like their platform, but because they were shouted down by the conservative media, people that just don't understand, because someone cheated them, whatever. Just continue being what you're trying to be. It's worthy and working great for you."
But I'm not a good republican. I argue with my republican friends against bush all the time, and don't really care much for him, except that he is willing to fight for Western Civilization. But in spite of this, there is no way I will vote for the democrats in their current form. Just one example: Democrats rail against corporations because they are too large and powerful, but the largest and most powerful corporation is the US Federal Government.
I'm now becoming worried that the republicans will increasingly dominate the elections in the years to come, and democrats will increasingly become confined to just a few coastal states. This means there will be no competition, and that concerns me, as the current long term war against terror pushes the country further right, potentially to a religious state.
So, if you want, take your intellectual and emotional energy and expend it on conspiracy theories. Don't discover why the platform isn't working. Continue to think the problem is outside, not inside. Claim that you were thwarted by Swift Boat Veterans, whatever, and ignore Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, etc.
Unfortunately, that will simply divide the country, and I think the losers will be the democrats.
These thoughts degrade our democracy, by casting doubt upon the process itself. And all for egotistical reasons that don't end up helping the democrat cause. As I was once told, it is time to find the adults (in the debate).
Ed Barbar, President and General Manager, Furnit USA
Don't fall for it just to get those measly advantages. It is far better to make sure that nobody can change thousands of votes easily, and that's why paper is best.
A voting machine looks to me like a way to create more problems than to provide a real solution to anything. I won't support them because the average volunteer lacks the proficiency to know if anything is wrong with a complex system, and I don't want anyone handling the election except for ordinary citizens.
With a normal ballot box, it's obvious if someone is trying to break into it. It's obvious if it's being swapped with another ballot box. It's obvious if your paper ballot has been physically placed inside it. Many things are obvious that would remain hidden with a voting machine. It's just a risk not worth taking.
The guy is really dumb.
Kerry may not be a prize, but at least he's not dumb.
Bush is just really really dumb.
And I'm a 46 year old republican who voted republican since most of you guys were a twinkle in your daddy's eye.
This guy is the worst guy since I've been born. That was Eisenhower for those slept through social studies.
This audit needs to be done. A significant fraction of the US population is losing confidence that elections are being run fairly. The next step in this thought process is to decide that change can only come from methods outside the democratic process. Then we have bigger problems. Everyone, regardless of their political beliefs should be behind this.
"who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage."
Gay marriage is not a morality issue, it is a SOCIAL issue.
Lets look at it another way...the religious nuts are okay with gay people living together, but as soon as they get married, then...its bad because they're not living in sin? I don't get the reasoning.
Moreover, you have an issue with two people who love each other getting married because they have the same sets of genital types. But you have no issue with a president who lied to us about why he started a war, and no issue with a vice president who got a multi-billion dollar sweetheart deal as a result of that war. You have no problem with an administration that has suspended the constition (the prisoners in Cuba) in the name of terrorism, but you have a problem because two gay guys want to live together in a legal union.
Honestly, if that's how you imagine God thinks, then I want nothing to do with your god. I think you're twisted.
"whereas Whites voted for Bush 2 to 1"
As a whole. But college educated (i.e. critical thinkers) did not support Bush.
I guess the klansman felt bush was the lesser of two evils.
Yup. That's *exactly* what this is - check the machines, check the processes, if candidate info turns up we'll report but that's not our target.
:)
Heh. If y'all think *I* would get involved in a last ditch "save Kerry!" operation, I recently posted a pic of an old motorcycle I just partially rebuilt. Note my helmet:
http://www.equalccw.com/bikeone.jpg
Unlike most people think, not all of us old-style Republicans would cut taxes to zero - most of us would rather see the debt paid off than lower taxes right now, as we think its a greater risk to the country's fiscal stability.
Good luck.. the largest purchaser of US Treasury Bonds is the Saudi Arabian government. They are bankrolling the Bush treasury looting, and in exchange someday they can use the World Bank to turn the USA into another Argentina (at which point, all the fiscally-mobile neo-cons hide their US flags, and bail for a tax haven like Bermuda).
Osama binLaden doesn't need to bankrupt the US... he just needs to sit back and watch.
"Fraud would be a massive scandal, more than enough to unseat the President, which would be somewhat ironic because according to several other measures he won that election without it."
Sure, but look at Watergate. Nixon was pulling dirty tricks on McGovern because he didn't want to lose, however, Nixon would have won anyway.
The scandal was enough to make him resign. Ironically, had he just run on his record (and Nixon was hated far more than the lightweight "Shrub" in office right now), he would have won handily and did.
So logically, a smart guy like Nixon would never approve of the dirty tricks at the Watergate.
And yet he did it anyway.
So what was your argument again...Bush is smarter than Nixon? Is that your entire thesis?
That's so...so...cute.
"WHO MADE THE CHOICE TO HAVE SEX?"
We don't have a choice to have sex. Next to eating, its the most basic human drive.
God made us Horney so that we can have lots of kids. What the anti-choice people don't like is that to them, an abortion is going against god's will to be fruitful and multiply.
That's why they're called "the wacko religious right". Because they actually believe in gods in clouds wanting people to have babies.
Its sick, but that's what's governing this country. Superstitous wackos.
Auditing is good and all, btu I Don't think we'll ever be able to be 100% confident in the votes. 90%, definitely. 99%, probably, but not 100%.
And in cases like 2000-FL, where there was a very small margin, I think we shoudl consider that difference statistically insignificant and find a way to resolve the issue coarsely.
Perhaps splitting electoral votes, or some sort of a showdown (i.e. candidates compete in a game of connect four).
If the people can't decide, then don't try to make a decision based on their indecision. Split the decision, or find another way to make the decision.
This is just bullshit. This is precisely the way we do things in Australia, and I would claim that our system is far less prone to electoral fraud, and in fact more honest, than most of the systems in use in the US.
And I _still_ believe this even though we just re-elected a despicable right-wing lying weasel as Prime Minister against all my hopes.
What a long, strange trip it's been.
The right wing christian nut-jobs are trying to make us a christian nation.
I don't see african americans, or any other minority trying to remake this country in their image.
In fact, the only people who seem to cause trouble these days are the militant right-wing christian fundamentalist.
God is not happy with you, and trust me, the only time God speaks to Bush is to tell him he's going to hell for killing all those Iraqis.
Bandwidth Limit Exceeded The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later. Apache/1.3.31 Server at www.blackboxvoting.org Port 80
Your resources are considerable, yet you run out of bandwidth on your website? Bunch of hacks you are...
You put into words exactly my situation and feeling on the election.
I watch this Bush guy, and he's dumb, and dishonest. And everybody around you thinks exactly the opposite. Yet, you know you're right. And you wonder about the rest of these guys who don't get it.
I really don't get who could vote for this clown.
I suspect this is how some people felt in Germany in the early 30's.
Actually, most of Ohio uses the good old fashion punchcards - pregnant chads and all....
see title... :)
The entire board of Blackboxvoting and its officers have been declaired enemy combatants, arrested, and moved to a Navy brig.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
probably one of the variant because i already made the font earlier this year.
I was planning on putting a check digit in it.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
classify it the same way that discrimination or sexual harrasment is classified: if after voting, you loose your job or are demoted, the employer can be sued and will have to justify his actions.
If instead the employer gives a promotion or a bonus, chances are somebody else will complain because they didn't know or didn't get one or think it unfair, etc.
Or you could also do what was mentioned elsewhere: print an index key to a database record on the stub that only the stubholder (yes it's a new word) will have access to.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
Kerry lost largely on high voter turnout for those who opposed him on moral grounds, especially gay marriage.
Ironically, Bush and Kerry have (as far as I can tell) identical stands on gay marriage. They are both against gay marriage, and for civil unions.
The Republican party's official stance is against recognition of any kind, but Bush said recently on Good Morning America that he felt civil unions should be allowed.
And yet people are deciding how to vote based on this issue, when we're at war and the economy is still in trouble? I don't get it. The abortion issue I understand slightly more, for people who are very religious... but the fact is that this is an issue almost totally in the hands of the courts. Bush didn't get anything significant done re abortion during the last 4 years (and he stated during the 2000 campaign and again after the "partial birth" abortion ban that he would not seek a total ban on abortion), and Kerry has already stated that he has no plans to do anything. Again, this is a top priority to voters? Boggles my mind.
Diebold (and Sequoia & suchl) must provide us with proof that the above is, indeed, an unsubstantiated allegation.
Ed Craig "Who cares what you think?" George W. Bush, 4th of July 2001
Please, we're both in Wisconsin, so you can come over and see that I haven't donned a tin-foil hat since dressing as a robot at age 8.
Check out my page to see how CNN silently revised its exit poll results for Ohio between 12:24am and 1:41am. In order for their numbers to make sense, Kerry must have received negative votes in later exit polls.
thanks
I don't see you providing any facts which contradict the poster's position. It pretty much matches my tally of the facts. You're the dope who needs to get lost.
We are getting multiple reports of OSCE (the guys invited by US forign Department to observe the election) being denied access to
a) polling stations b) republican regional headquarters
fishy?
We, as europeans, have to respect your desicion and must now do what we have to do. Everyone.
There are a clear loser: The USA.
They will be marked forever in the world. The last election was clearly a fraud, and we thought that the american people was betrayed. We thought you only gave so much votes, because you didn't knew what will happen. But now you did know it.
You elect an fascist on purpose. Just look at a good dictionary what "facism" means. The election is legal, Kerry surrenders.
This will have consequences.
Now i must say "From today Morning, i am an Anti-American"
The US-Citizens gave their votes, and made a President. Now they have to live with it, or to die for.
We can only watch in Europe for things to come, and everyone here has to decide whether to buy american products or not, or to handle "God's own country".
I already decided what to to. And my decision will be hard for me, cause i have to miss a lot of the good things that came from the USA.
I hope everything will be good.
God help us all.
The audit needs to be done -- and done thoroughly, not some lame 9/11 commission style hand job.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
No matter what the truth, no matter what you said before or how valid your position, the instant you say "300 years of opression" we stop listening and thinking about your position.
Talk about how things are today. Talk about how they must be better tomorrow. Give numbers. Provide passion. All of that is good, and it works. You'll at least have a chance of getting your message across.
But say "300 years" and it all flys out the window, you might as well have stayed home.
This is not a "racest position" this a statement of well understood cultural bias. I am comming right out and _telling_ _you_ what that alien thing is that seems to secretly unite white men of european dissent. This is what is happening in our minds behind that inscrutable and perplexing white-man-grin. That is what is passing between us when we do that glance-around as you are speaking. It's what is happening behind-the-scenes when you get that strange feeling that you are losing your audience. Honestly and truely.
I'm a pragmatic liberal white male, a truck-driving pusdo-redneck, a homosexual, and a European mongrel of the most pervasive kind. I am a prime example of one of your greatest potential allies in the white establishment(*), and even _I_ cannot force my self to keep listening when people talk about "historical injustice". I have been pre-programmed to tune that out, and that programming runs almost impossibly deep. What chance do you think you are going to have with an old-south good-old-boy.
For two thousand years "western culture", or the men in it anyway, have been weened on "suck it up" and "take it like a man." It's _engrained_ in our cultural psyche. Take. Own. Conquer. Belittle and discard the weak. We are raised to devalue *ANYONE* who compains about past injustice. Just watch any two white boys, age 12, pick on a third and you will get the picture.
Really.
I'm just trying to tell you something here.
Watch some "hick comedy" sometime. "(She|They) are talking about *that* again" is the gal-darn _refrain_ of every white male complaining about "them" no-matter _who_ "they" happen to be this time.
Most of the glass ceiling that women and minorities run into is simply a loss of audience. Like magic, there are certian things you can say or do that turn your words to "blah blah blah" _instantly_. When you do those things that make any particular people stop listening to you, you lose the power to influence those people. If you want to get anywhere with us, you have to cut that out.
Why do you think that the white-male media always trots out King's "I have a Dream" speach? It was by no measure the most intellegent or insightful thing he said. He was much deeper and more eloquent later in his mission. But it is a powerful image and it unremittingly looks forward. We are *programed* to respect that. Read a press release some time, any press release, but especially one from a company who has "had a bad last quarter."
I'm not telling you your wrong to _feel_ the ways you feel. I'm just trying to tell you that when you *say* it you are shooting yourself in the foot.
The word "injustice" is almost enough right there, but "historical injustice"? Please. You might as well put on floppy shoes and a clown nose. There has been virtually no _historical_ _justice_. The "injustice" is just background noise. Everybody, every ethnic people, every cultural group, every political class, was screwed for "their turn" in european/western history.
You will *NEVER*, no matter how you "[call] a spade a spade", find your ideas or solutions have fallen on fertile ears when you cast your argument in terms of reparations of *ANY* sort. The very mention of the idea _salts_ _the_ _earth_ you are trying to sow.
There has never, in all of recorded history, been a conclave of white european men gathered together discussing "reparations" for the socally injured, where that conversation did _NOT_ end in a chuckle of "yea, sure, any day
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
These are the guys who have massive experience in observing elections. Their report is due later today, but from what has leaked through, I expect it to be damning.
Some things the observers from OSCE said:
* In some areas, they (as official observers!) had less access to the polls than during the elections in Kasachstan.
* The computer systems in many places were less secured than in Venecuela.
* A polish observer said the polls in Serbia(!) were easier to watch and more transparent.
That's a bunch of slap-down from professionals with years of experience. The US has, election-wise, officially fallen to the standards of a third-world country.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you have nothing to worry about, then why moan about an audit?
Seriously though, I am suprised that Republicans are spinning it as "Sore Losers" instead of "Ok lets do this and then STFU".
Errr..I dunno about *your* MSM, but the Canadian news media generally refers to the plethora of voting styles as "punch cards, paper ballots, ..., and dubious new touch screen voting machines" or something along those lines.
/always/ imply that the new machines are suspect, and I think I've heard them go into some degree of detail.
They
-Rob Ewaschuk
Im sure its much better... I cant speak to the quality of canadian media, but around here I have been consistently disappointed.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
Politicians campaigning in churches is not religion in politics, it's politics in religion. There's a difference.
-rozzin.
Kent Brockman : In breaking news Iraq has re-elected President Bush by a margin of 3 million votes in the popular vote.
Monty Burns : Horsefeathers! I distinctly remember telling Simpson to erase the cheat codes!
You don't have to be from Eastern Europe to know election fraud.
We've had our share. Chicago was infamous for machine politics and ballot-stuffing. Anyone else remember Box 13 that helped LBJ win a US Senate seat in 1948.
Time was, a political boss could call precinct vote-counter and ask "how many votes did I win" and the vote-counter would reply "how many do you need?"
We all hope those days are over.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Public records show that unauthorized tampering has already
. ... at least for me).
.html?view=1901 .
occurred with these computers -- during an election. In a primary
election in King County, Washington, held during September 2004, there
are 3 hours, from 9:52 p.m. until 1:31 a.m., missing from the record
kept in the "central tabulator audit log". The organization "Black
box voting" ( http://www.blackboxvoting.org ) discovered this after
obtaining the "audit log" through a public records request. "Black
box voting" explains
>> The audit log is a computer-generated automatic record similar to
>> the "black box" in an airplane, that automatically records access
>> to the Diebold GEMS central tabulator (unless, of course, you go
>> into it in the clandestine way we demonstrated on September 22 in
>> Washington DC at the National Press club.)
>>
>> The central tabulator audit log is an FEC-required security
>> feature. The kinds of things it detects are the kinds of things you
>> might see if someone was tampering with the votes: Opening the vote
>> file, previewing and/or printing interim results, altering
>> candidate definitions (a method that can be used to flip votes).
In addition, they ("Black box voting") KNOW there should be some
information for that time frame. They were there, at the scene in
King County, and obtained "summary reports" of the ongoing vote
tabulation that are time-stamped during the 9:52 p.m. to 1:31 a.m.
These "summary reports" are automatically generated and stored in the
audit log, and there is no explanation as to why they are now absent.
You can read more about the King County, Washington situation at
http://www.blackboxvoting.org#breaking . There are images posted of
the corrupted central tabulator audit log
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/auditlog.PDF and the "summary reports"
that are missing http://www.blackboxvoting.org/resultspages.PDF
(The first doesn't open for me, somebody should email them and let
them know this link seems to be broken
What was removed from the "central tabulator audit log" besides these
summary reports? Evidence of vote-tampering? Nobody knows.
Less well-documented but potentially more frightening was the apparent
manipulation of computer voting machine results during the Wisconsin
Democratic primary. Martin Bento did a comparison between results
obtained in precincts not using the new computers and those that do,
and discovered striking discrepancies:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/e xplodedview/1389
Finally, there were some very fishy things going on with the exit poll data. Dick Morrison is certainly an expert at using polls to predict political outcomes, as you will know if you are familiar with his political work for Clinton, etc. . Morris thinks the discrepancies were so inexplicable that there should be an investigation, and has written a New York Post piece titled "EXIT-POLL OUTRAGE" http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/3 1590.htm. Morris tends to work on the Republican side these days -- he assumes it must have been the exit polls that were at fault.
But given the degree of uncertainty surrounding e-voting I think there should be a call for an investigation of possible vote fraud. As the following blogger notes,
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/11/3/04741/7055
>> What is puzzling everyone at the moment is the
>> discrepancy between the exit polls and the
>> votes that are being reported. The way the
>> pundits are framing this issue is: what went
>> wrong with the exit polls?
>>
>
on the Thom Hartmann program. (about 40 min in)
1 -2004).mp3
(best show out there)
http://homepage.mac.com/benburch/HartmanShow-(3-1
telly
According to www.gregpalast.com there appears to major discrepencies and he is theorising that it comes down to ballots invalidated. Some quarter of a million to be exact. He is also arguing that the exit polls showed kerry way ahead and the exit polls were accurate everywhere except for Ohio and Florida.
Although Palast is definitely a Bush hater he is a respected journalist and he does check his facts.
" we're in a WAR with people who will not simply go away and leave us alone"
Oddly enough, people in the Middle East are saying the same things about us.
Isn't that ironic?
Bizarre as it may be, there are more women than men.
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Voting in U.S. elections this week was mostly fair, but the lines were too long at some polling stations, according to an international rights group monitoring the presidential contest for first time.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said on Thursday that before the vote it had received "widespread" allegations of fraud and voter suppression, mainly among minorities, and raised concern that confidence in the system could be undermined.
However, the group said it was unable to substantiate the allegations. It also said that on election day it observed relatively few attempts to challenge a voter's eligibility, despite concerns before the vote.
Europe's top rights watchdog, which groups 55 countries including the United States, said the election "mostly met" international standards for free and fair elections and defied fears of a repeat of 2000's debacle.
The OSCE's observations basically matched civil-rights groups' assessments that while there were voting problems, they were not on such a widespread scale to call into question the result -- unlike in Florida in 2000.
"The system has been improved because the poll workers and officials were so eager to have things work well and there was also high awareness among voters to make sure their vote counted," the OSCE delegation head, Rita Suessmuth, said.
It might be impossible to know if any votes were recorded incorrectly (or perhaps maliciously altered in secret) by technology. This applies to all political platforms, etc.
I'd be interested in knowing if there was any sort of statistically significant correlation between the type of voting technology used and the delta between the polling data and the reported vote.
CNN reports that a queen of clubs broke an 1,847-1,847 tie in a local election.
If this had been on touch-screen, how would you do a recount?
Oh wait, Nevada was smart enough to insist on a paper printout. I guess this really was a tie after all.
I wonder if they used a real deck of cards or if they used MS-Windows Solitaire????
--
I've earned karma, I've done moderator duty, why the #$@^* can't I get a Slashdot story accepted?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Thank you Lulu for clearing up and addressing some of my concerns. The OVC design is far preferable to some of the other options out there.
But, whatever the technical excellence of the design that is adopted, in the long term, I expect that certain undesirable changes will creep in under the tent as a result of public ignorance.
For instance, don't you see it coming with all the brouhaha over illegal aliens? Soon a driver license RFID reader will be integrated with such a system tied to an identity database so as to "make sure" that only legal, registered voters can vote. It'll easily pass right under the radar of the voting public without guessing that such a system takes away their right to the secret ballot (not that most people know that they have this right).
Specifically, this can evolve into a system where the record of each voter is stored for later review by profile-builders in order to investigate those who did not vote for the Great Leader. Then, elections will always go 99% to the same party. Oh wait...
Aparently all I've managed to tell you is NOTHING...
You aparently cannot read.
Keep holding yourself down my brother, it's what you seem best at.
You say I'm racest because I am trying to tell you that your aproach isn't workable, and I tell you how come black slavery doesn't make you any more special or deserving of some cash prize compared to any other descendent of an oppressed person?
You say I'm racest because I don't buy your racest justifications for your own self-centerd feelings of unfulfilled entitlement?
Nobody will take you seriously when you demand reperations, because *everybody* deserves reperations for *something* back there somewhere. And not "way back", but just contemporarily back. Do you know how many white men were slaves in that same period? (I'm guessing no.) Quite frankly, my cut-off point is two generations. If you havn't shaken hands with the enslaved ancestor the statue of limitations is expired. I don't see you offering reperations to the chineese workers that were killed after the age of black slavery in order to build the transportation infrastructure (railroads) do I? Do I see you running overseas to give a cheque to the people who your government is exploiting and killing for oil today? I don't beleive I do.
Face it, your high horse is down here in the mud with the rest of us.
And nobody likes a whiner.
I am not trying to deny your place in this world, I'm trying to tell you that this world doesn't owe you a thing that it magically does owe someone else.
Demand your share because you deserve it for who you are, not who great grand parents were.
Besides, did my ancestors own black slaves? Do you know? Do I know? (I do know, it so happens, and none of them did; but I bet you think I owe you soemthing anyway because I am white...) I am descended from Strongbow however, so should I send my black reparation check to the Ireland?
You seem to feel that "this country's foundation" is limited to the purely local events. Like the USA has no basis in its own history, and that somehow there is some sort of conservation of injustice. You have all these myopic theories that just happen to star you as the beneficiary.
I was just trying to tell you that your audience isn't listening *BECAUSE* you are bringing up things your _audience_ thinks are IRRELEVANT because it is to late to change any of that, and it is a few drops of blood on the floor of the abattoir.
You tell me that I don't understand the foundation of this country simply because my scope isn't focused on your grevance. Quite frankly your herratage is one pretty-tiny list of grevances snuggled inside a much longer and more serious set of problems.
I fully apreciate that a black man is way more likely to end up in jail than any other ethnic group.
I know that the life expectancy and infant mortality for blacks is much wors than for whites.
I know that young black people are getting an consistently and persistently inferior education.
I know that all of the above are contributing factors to the systematic financial restraint of black people (it's harder for black people to get credit, good jobs, etc.)
All of these things need to be fixed. Not "addressed" not "workded out" but FIXED.
NONE OF IT, however, needs to be fixed "because of 300 years of oppression".
It needs to be fixed because it is wrong *TODAY* and it weakens EVERYBODY when we are raising an undereducated and angry group of people who are getting screwed TODAY.
See, "today" and "tomorrow", THOSE are the words of social change. Those are the words of people with a future. The argument can be made without "you hurt my forebearers so you owe me."
The more you simper and whine about this (noun) owing you that (whatever) because of who your great grandparents were, the closer you come to a word-substitution joke about rich white kids.
Youre demands are falling on deaf ears precisely because
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
Now Moore can write another 2 books and a few films about how Bush stole his second election. ;)
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
P.P.S.
And no, my entire post cannot "be summed up as some sort of demand that blacks ask nicely for they're Civil Rights".
It could _actually_ be summed up nicely by saying "blacks should demand their civil rights without trying to justify them as repayment and reparations. Their rights exist as an absolute, completely without the 'but my pappy' crap, and whenever someone says 'but they were slaves and that means they deserve more' everybody stops listening and nothing gets done."
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
From http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
"Black Box Voting has taken the position that fraud took place in the 2004 election through electronic voting machines. We base this on hard evidence, documents obtained in public records requests, inside information, and other data indicative of manipulation of electronic voting systems. What we do not know is the specific scope of the fraud. We are working now to compile the proof, based not on soft evidence -- red flags, exit polls -- but core documents obtained by Black Box Voting in the most massive Freedom of Information action in history"
Don't forget that the governor of FL is Mr. Bush's brother. Hmmmmm....... I smell smoke
... is a proto-fascist state.
..... do some research and make up your own mind. Germany was a democracy that 'elected' Hitler. Don't be fooled by the fact that the word 'socialist' was used in Hilter's party's name .... and don't let the words 'republic' and 'democracy' fool you either.
Next on the cards is this people:
1) the draft
2) court trials using the bible as the source of 'justice' replacing the consititution
3) mass demos and detentions under Patriot act
4) take a guess ?
This may not happen but someone has to slap you in the face to WAKE YOU LOT UP. If Iran is next then we're looking at WWIII people.
Heard of the Internet ? Why not look up the history about how Hilter came to power and who was in cahoots with him
He who gives up some liberty for some safety deserves neither. Who was it that said that ?
The two most liberal counties in the state have the highest number of no-shows, and a turnout rate that was almost 10% lower than the state average? Hmm...I guess Dubya just didn't piss off the liberal city slickers enough to get them out to vote.
On the one hand, the rate of no-shows seems to correlate with population: the third highest number of no-shows was in the third most populous county (Hamilton). On the other hand, Hamilton had a higher-than-average turnout rate, and guess who they voted for? Hint: it's Cinncinati, which borders Kentucky.
This could be a completely legal, if unethical, tactic by Republican Secretary of State Ken Blackwell to suppress the vote: there simply weren't enough voting machines. I arrived at the polls at 6:30AM, when they opened, and had to wait an hour to vote. Many people waited much longer, and many people simply left when they saw how long the lines were, or after waiting in the rain for a few hours. Curiously, you didn't heat about these problems in the Republican-dominated suburbs. Remember, Blackwell is the guy who refused to accept new registrations that weren't printed on bond paper until the courts slapped his wrist. According to a poll worker, voting machines are allocated according to turnout in the previous election, which means that last-minute voter drives are going to result in longer waits, but if those liberal counties really did register hundreds of thousands of new voters, how come lines were so long if the turnout rate was actually lower in those counties?
Note the San Jose Mercury News http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/sp ecial_packages/election2004/10091977.htm/
headline: "Despite long lines, voter turnout in Ohio not record breaking". And from the article: "The county just didn't plan on having a whole college to vote," said Sussman, who waited 10 hours to cast his vote for Kerry at 9 p.m., two and a half hours after the polls closed.
This also puts into perspective Blackwell's successful battle in the days before the election to prevent provisional ballots from being cast outside of one's own precinct. I suspect Blackwell knew there weren't nearly enough voting machines in certain precincts, and wanted to prevent voters from simply trotting to the next precinct to vote. For instance, in Republican-dominated Worthington, 10 minutes north of my precinct, there were no lines. The most clever thing about it is that it's not illegal, just unfair.
Meanwhile, if half of those 670,000 voters did actually show up at the polls, and if their votes tracked the actual results in those counties (Cleveland 66% for Kerry, Columbus 54%), that would have swung the election, since the difference in Ohio was around 136,000 votes.
Brushing aside conspiracy theories, it seems that blackboxvoting.org would do well to at least question how voting machines were allocated in Ohio. It wouldn't be too hard to look at voter turnout in the last election, and compare that with actual voting machine allocations. Who will bet me $1 that left-leaning precincts were short-shrifted?
Even as a Kerry voter, I am still on the fence about this whole "voter fraud" thing, but do agree that an investigation should take place if any _solid and substantial_ evidence can be brought to a federal court.
Whether an investigation proves Bush or Kerry to have legitimately won the election is secondary to the notion that a high crime of voter tampering could have occurred, and also the fact that our e-voting system is insufficient for auditing purposes.
I'm at a loss, though. If Bush indeed has won and his "side" is still indicted on voter fraud, can these people be punished in any way? Conversely, if fruitless tampering on the Kerry site is proven, can Kerry and those in his team be punished in any way even if they are on the losing team anyway? This is given that a crime has been committed.
Finally, if voter fraud has been proven on either side and _Kerry_ is proven to be the legitimate winner, what happens next?
This has escalated to even more surreal proportions than I ever thought possible after November 2nd.
"When Noriega addressed the packed courtroom at his sentencing 10 months after the trial began, he dropped crumbs for the media to follow. The two-hour statement mentioned U.S. involvement in a 1979 attempt to murder the Shah of Iran and the 1981 air explosion that killed his predecessor, Gen. Omar Torrijos. He accused a former head of the DEA of perjury and George Bush of instigating phony terrorist disturbances in the Panama Canal Zone when he was CIA director in the mid-'70s."
Georges Bush instigating phony terrorist disturbances? Sounds familiar. I think I hear echo...
Now can we put that in wikipedia and make it stick? No.
Slashdot, for all its folly and opinionated people, still has somewhere portions of the truth other media do not. Somewhere between two arrogant opinions, usually. (-;
Joy!
Microsoft is pure dog-ma. FreeBSD is pure cat-ma.